There are a lot of reasons to watch “Darfur Now.” There’s the urgent need to resolve the disastrous situation in western Sudan; there’s the chance to see George Clooney playing celebrity diplomat in Cairo and Beijing; there’s the fact that Ted Braun’s engaging, smartly edited sum-up of the 21st century’s worst humanitarian crisis represents another notch in the belt of the reinvigorated documentary genre. The question is: Which do people consider most important?

Nonfiction films such as “Darfur Now,” which is out today, are filling what you might call an empathy gap in today’s coverage of Third World crises. Deadlines and profit pressures have always weighed on journalists; in the information age, however, these forces have, for many reporters (and for their editors and producers), tightened into a vise grip, leaving a significant amount of sincerity and depth to dissipate in the shift toward glib, easily consumable commentary and it-happened-a-minute-ago breaking news.

Like an increasing number of fictional Hollywood films, Mr. Braun’s documentary extracts a compelling human story from a hot-button issue in a benighted corner of Africa. (So does “War/Dance,” an intimate, beautifully shot documentary about children in war-torn northern Uganda that arrives in theaters next week.) But unlike those films, “Darfur Now” spotlights real people, all of whom seem too preoccupied with the emergency at hand to be distracted by the presence of Mr. Braun’s cameras. The result is a crisp, unfanciful splicing together of their stories and a succinct portrait of Darfur’s plight that puts its urgency in high relief without needing to resort to car chases and love interests. Of course, in order to deliver the film to mainstream audiences, a few pop-culture surprises were required.

The film follows six people, three of whom are on the ground in Darfur: two African victims of the government-allied Janjaweed militia’s rapacious sweeps of their homeland, and a World Food Program team leader from Ecuador. Working toward a solution from afar are Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court prosecutor who is building a case against the Sudanese government from the Hague, and two activists in Southern California: a 24-year-old go-getter named Adam Sterling, who urges the state government to divest from Sudan, and the actor Don Cheadle, whose efforts to bring attention to Africa began with his Oscar-nominated role in “Hotel Rwanda,” and have led him to become an unofficial American emissary along with his “Ocean’s Eleven” co-star, Mr. Clooney. (Respectably, the film also grants Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations some screen time to defend his government’s appalling behavior.)

“Darfur Now” — co-produced by Mr. Cheadle, who was not originally slated to appear in the film — is both mainstream and ambitious. Mr. Braun said he decided to put the actor’s Darfur campaign on camera in an effort to “see and understand what motivates famous people to speak and act on behalf of a place a million miles away.” (Not to mention what motivates them to sing: Almost inevitably, the film closes with a song performed by Bono.) But Mr. Braun and producer Cathy Schulman were also intent on drawing viewers who might not otherwise be inclined to sit through a documentary about Africa. “There was no point in reaching a small audience, or one that was already converted,” Mr. Braun said.

Of course, big-budget features such as “Blood Diamond” (which addressed civil war and the horrific diamond trade in Sierra Leone) open their arms just as wide. But although Ms. Schulman and Mr. Cheadle toyed with the idea of a fictional treatment, they ultimately decided that Darfur — the first conflict ever to be officially termed genocide while still in progress — was simply too pressing an issue. “Feature films take a long time to mobilize,” Mr. Braun pointed out.

And so Mr. Braun, who previously had only directed historical documentaries, was enlisted to make a documentary quickly about an unfolding crisis. After struggling to secure insurance and a license from the American Office of Foreign Assets Control (which currently has an embargo against Sudan), the crew landed in the 108-degree heat of Darfur in early 2007. By June, most of the shooting was complete. Amazingly, the director and his team finished post-production in time for the film to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. Just a few months later, the film has already screened twice at the United Nations and will reach American audiences just as peace talks in Libya have put Darfur back in the headlines.

Like the best of the recent spate of Iraq documentaries, “Darfur Now” is a thorough observation of an ongoing conflict, a documentary subgenre that barely existed before the advent of lightweight digital cameras, but one that is beginning to flourish just as in-depth mainstream coverage of faraway conflicts, particularly dangerous ones, appears to be drying up. As James Longley did in his superb, lyrical “Iraq in Fragments,” Mr. Braun spent months getting to know his subjects so that viewers halfway across the world could connect with them on a human level.

“We had the luxury of time that print and TV journalists rarely have,” he said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that documentary filmmaking is reaching such wide audiences at this point.”

Filmed with cinema-vérité restraint, the Sudanese victims of the conflict are neither token sufferers nor the noble, handsome heroes (and cute children) usually found on the big screen. They include a displaced sheik named Ahmed Mohammed Abakar, a leader of a refugee camp who seems poised but worries about losing his mind, and Hejewa Adam, who joined rebel forces after her infant son was beaten to death by militiamen. Mr. Braun’s film devotes more attention to these average Africans than do most films about the region, including the recent Darfur documentary “The Devil Came on Horseback.”

The film’s immediate sense of drama is, in large part, a product of its feature-film sensibility, expressed not with Hollywood lighting and flashy editing, effects that seem to be making their way into many documentaries these days, but rather with a powerful human narrative that is free of talking heads.

“I wanted to make a film that was going to be as emotionally satisfying and as emotionally rich and as emotionally memorable as any narrative feature film,” Mr. Braun said. Tellingly, he added that he did not model his film on Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” or on David Guggenheim’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the two high-profile political tracts often credited with rejuvenating the documentary genre, but rather on the patchwork narratives of Stephen Gaghan’s “Syriana” and “Traffic,” as well as the humane, gritty dramas of mid-century Italian cinema.

“We can, as documentarians, deliver the same kind of emotional sense of scale, and cinematic spectacle and human intimacy that a feature film can,” Mr. Braun said. “And now that we have these tools, these lightweight HD cameras, we can move with a freedom and speed that just was never possible before.”

His film suggests that between traditional journalism and the global-issue blockbuster, there is lots of room for documentaries with a light tread — and, one hopes, a heavy impact.