With a West Point diploma, four years of Army service, and multiple bylines as an entertainment journalist on his résumé, Rod Lurie’s bio reads like a throwback to the pre-film-school studio system days, when directors actually went out and lived in the real world before slaving away on the studio assembly lines. Like his fellow soldier-journalist-auteur, Sam Fuller, Mr. Lurie’s three features — including 2000’s “The Contender” and 2001’s “The Last Castle” — are fashioned in broad, unashamedly populist strokes.

Mr. Lurie’s latest film, “Resurrecting The Champ,” is no exception. But the story of an ambitious reporter’s ethical lapses while writing a magazine article about a destitute ex-prizefighter mines considerably grayer territory than his previous feature portraits of individual values triumphing over the dehumanizing and duplicitous mechanisms of politics.

Erik (Josh Hartnett) is a small-time sports writer for a Denver daily. Though he works quickly and cleanly, his boss Metz (Alan Alda) tells him that his articles amount to “a lot of typing and not much writing.” We soon learn that Erik is so deeply in the shadow of his late father, a sports radio veteran who abandoned his family when Erik was a boy, that the young reporter is too busy searching his own soul to capture the hearts of his readers.

Since everyone around him — including his estranged wife, Joyce (Kathryn Morris), and his trusting son, Teddy (Dakota Goyo) — keeps reminding him that his talent is as great as it is untapped, Erik misguidedly believes that he’s just one “big story” away from stepping out of the shadows. At a lunch meeting with Whitley (David Paymer), one of the paper’s upper-tier editors, Erik successfully pitches a profile of “the champ” (Samuel L. Jackson), a homeless man who boxed under the name of “Battling Bob Satterfield.” As far as Whitley or anyone else can remember, Satterfield is dead. But in a series of one-on-one interviews in parking lots and on park benches, the champ regales Erik with ringside memories and convinces Erik that Bob Satterfield is only down-and-out, not dead and gone.

After his disastrous casting in Brian De Palma’s feeble “Black Dahlia” adaptation, it’s nice to see Mr. Hartnett carry his character’s rather prickly combination of gullibility, insecurity, and narcissism with a minimum of the clueless posing he is prone to fall back on. In Erik, he has taken the role of an emotionally penny-wise and foolish eternal adolescent who favors the actor’s own limitations. Mr. Jackson, meanwhile, shuffles and shadow-boxes in filthy sweats under a crown of gray dreadlocks, doling out wisdom and lies in a raspy, high-pitched voice, and he makes the most of a role that borders on Hollywood’s discomforting latter day “magical black man” cliché.

Mr. Lurie fills the film’s crisply composed widescreen tableaus with a dozen or more speaking parts undertaken by an aging board of capable performers: Mr. Alda memorably distills the sunlight-starved geeky machismo of professional print journalists in decline; Terri Hatcher ably plays a cable television executive, and Peter Coyote is marvelous and unrecognizable in a Miami beach tan and Lew Wasserman maxi-frame glasses as a fight manager from the champ’s past.

Mr. Lurie clearly has a personal predilection for filling his Capraesque tapestries with symbolic and actual father-son relationships and paternalist conflicts. By the time “Resurrecting the Champ” starts asking and answering the obligatory hard questions about personal and professional compromise, nearly every male character in the film has put in some time as either a good, a bad, or an absent father. The sentiment behind the film’s sometimes awkward and repetitive glut of mopey masculine hand-wringing, apologizing, and accepting, feels sincere and goes a long way toward stitching up some glaring plot gashes and telegraphed narrative punches.

In a period when Hollywood filmmaking has veered sharply toward spectacle, and character-driven, issue-oriented drama is either presented with action movie cloddishness on the big screen or relegated to the small screen, it’s a pleasure to see a movie balance the personal and the political without making a deadly weapon out of the obvious. Despite some ineffective footwork, and clumsy clinches,”Resurrecting the Champ”wins this round on points.