A new film about the last hours of Robert F Kennedy is a deeply affecting eulogy for a lost idealism - and an amazingly assured comeback vehicle for its director and writer, the onetime Brat Packer Emilio Estevez, writes Michael Dwyer.

SCOTT Fitzgerald famously observed that there are no second acts in American lives. There have been many exceptions to disprove him, even among the emerging US actors of the 1980s known collectively as The Brat Pack. Rob Lowe, for example, survived a sex scandal that threatened to ruin his career and rebounded when he co-starred with Martin Sheen in the hit TV series The West Wing.

Now Sheen's son and Lowe's former co-star, Emilio Estevez, has re-emerged after years of obscurity with the achievement that is Bobby, an ambitious and affecting drama which he wrote and directed, and in which he features among a stellar ensemble cast.

"It is a cruel business," says Estevez, whose still-youthful features belie his age (44) and whose looks and voice resemble his father more than ever as he grows older. "We were all saddled with the responsibility of having to reinvent ourselves. You have to change, because otherwise you can get complacent.

"It's been a crazy trip. You just never know what's going to be handed to you and what's coming around the corner. There haven't been a lot of opportunities for me lately, so I'm just thrilled to be back doing what I'm passionate about again. It makes a change from all the interior monologues I've had down the years."

The last time Estevez felt so passionate about something, he says, was 10 years ago. He directed a film called The War at Home and starred as a traumatised Vietnam war veteran. "I was proud of that picture, but then it was discarded. Disney didn't have a frigging clue what to do with it. But I'm not bitter about it any more. I learned a lot from that experience."

Estevez grew up on film sets around the world, wherever his father's work took him, before making his own cinema debut when he was 20. Estevez used his father's real surname rather than his stage name. After joining Matt Dillon in the cast of two Susie Hinton adaptations (the teen angst movies Tex and The Outsiders), he seized upon a plum role in the cultish Repo Man, followed by the seminal Brat Pack pictures The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire.

These were movies rooted in the pains and harsh realities of growing up, and there were some more in store for Estevez in the real world, after offers of leading roles dried up in the 1990s. He admits to selling autographs over the internet to make a few dollars.

"That was to pay my bills," he says frankly. "I was doing everything I could to make ends meet. I took a second mortgage on the house. I directed some TV series. I did whatever I could do. At one point last year I even allowed myself to be talked into doing a half-hour TV show. My agent told me I should do it, that I would make a lot of money from it. But I said I'm not driven by that. Of course, I needed money to pay my bills, to pay child support. My agent said as I was already directing TV, what was the difference with acting in one? I told him not to confuse the issues."

Although his father enjoyed critical acclaim and high ratings in The West Wing and his brother Charlie Sheen is one of the highest paid actors on US television, Estevez resisted the TV route.

"When I'm directing, I can stay in the shadows," he says. "I don't have to go in front of the camera every day. TV has been very good for my father and for Charlie, but for me it feels more like going to work and having some shackles on, playing the same guy over and over. I'm not built that way. It takes a constitution that I don't possess. So, at the 11th hour I finally backed out of acting in the TV show and I walked away from a tremendous amount of money."

Instead, he immersed himself for years in shaping and honing the screenplay for Bobby, which is set at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles over the course of a single day, June 4th, 1968, culminating after midnight in the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.

Estevez layers his movie with multiple overlapping stories involving fictional characters in the hotel on the day. Among them are the manager (William H Macy) and his beautician wife (Sharon Stone); a racist catering manager (Christian Slater); a lonely, retired hotel doorman (Anthony Hopkins); a young bride (Lindsay Lohan) marrying a friend (Elijah Wood) to save him from the draft and Vietnam; and an immigrant (Freddy Rodriguez) working a double shift in the kitchen.

"I had to make so many choices when I was working out the screenplay - what stays and what goes," Estevez says. "I studied the movies of Robert Altman. He was a great inspiration, as was Paul Thomas Anderson. I really like the way he uses the Steadicam to follow the characters. It gives you much more fluidity and flexibility. If you see something, you can grab it. It gives the actors more freedom, too, because you can keep the camera further away from them and use a longer lens. I just got out of the actors' way."

Even though Estevez was only six when Kennedy was killed, the movie ultimately registers as an elegy laced with heartfelt sorrow for his fate.

"Coming from an Irish background and being Catholic, we related to the Kennedys and the force they became in American politics. My dad did some work for Bobby Kennedy's Senate campaign in New York. So from a young age I knew who he was. I shook his hand when I was five, although I don't remember it, but I do remember a year later when I woke my father to tell him that Bobby had been shot, and I watched him weep.

"The following year, in 1969, we were in Mexico, where my father was filming Catch-22. That was when my folks decided not to go back to New York. They wanted to make a go of it in the movies, and Los Angeles was the best place for that. We loaded up the car and drove to Los Angeles, and the first place we stopped was the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was shot. I can vividly remember walking through the lobby, the halls and the ballroom, holding my father's hand and listening to him talk about this place and the day the music died."

Estevez expresses his dismay that today's younger generation of actors are far more interested in partying than party politics.

"Young people need to re-engage with politics. The life of democracy depends on it. We've left it to the stuff shirts, and obviously they haven't been minding the store. If young people don't like the way the country is being run and they object to the policies we have around the world, they have to stand up, go out on the streets and say no. And we need sexier, charismatic leaders again, like the Kennedys, to make politics more alluring to younger people."

He is particularly pleased that his film has received an endorsement from RFK's widow, Ethel. "She won't watch the film," he says, "although some of her kids have seen it. But she's thrilled that an entire new generation is going to hear her husband's words and what that can do for the RFK memorial foundation that she drives. I was thrilled when she endorsed the film because I assumed it was something she wouldn't want to go near."

Estevez was disappointed that his father could not interrupt his homework as a student in Galway to attend the London premiere of Bobby. "I wanted my parents to come over from Galway, but my mom said he had seven books to read by Sunday. I understood, because I know he was taking his university course seriously. I count my folks among my closest friends. I know that's rare these days, but I truly adore them and I confide in them. They are sources of inspiration to me.

"My mother's voice is very prevalent in this film. She is all of the women. She's not someone caught up in the accoutrements of having the right dress and shoes, but she missed having dinner with President Johnson at the White House because she couldn't find the right hat. She stood in front of the mirror and couldn't figure out which hat to wear. And that's Helen Hunt's character in the film. All her lines about people growing older and being discarded are all from my mother."

As it happens, Martin Sheen plays the husband of Hunt's character in the movie.

"My father insisted, and this was even before he got a payday, that the family would travel with him wherever he was working," Estevez says. "I think it's because our family always travelled together that my father and mother are still together 45 years later. Very few couples have lasted together so long in this business."

All this travelling, rather than school, was his education, Estevez says. "It didn't always make for comprehensive studies, but we saw the world, and seeing the world was more instrumental in my development than reading about the world out of a book. I'm grateful for that.

"I think I would have loved college because I enjoyed so much doing all the research on this film. My fiancee has just got her master's in journalism. She's not a kid, she's 34, and she's been on this journey with me and she says I would have loved school."

The cast of Bobby also features a former fiancee of Estevez from the Brat Pack era - Demi Moore, who plays a boozy hotel cabaret singer. And her actor husband, Ashton Kutcher, features in the film as a young hippie who turns some naive young RFK aides on to drugs.

"She and I are fine now," says Estevez. "We've matured, which is something 20 years will do to you. One night we were talking over the phone about her character in Bobby. She had some fear and reluctance about playing this role. I'm not speaking out of school when I say that she found the character was like her own mother. I know that was not easy for her.

"Then, as we were talking, she asked me if I had cast anyone as the stoner guy in the film because Ashton had read the script and he loved it. So she put him on the phone to me and we talked until two in the morning, even though we had never met. That was terrific, so I asked him to do the role, and he's very funny in it. The film needed some of that humour because it's a Passion play."

Bobby opens next Friday