Costner plays a man whose vote really counts.

AP / KEVORK DJANSEZIAN

BOSTON Kevin Costner looks haggard and drawn and a little remote when he first sits down to talk about his new movie, Swing Vote, which opens Friday.

Oh, he’s pleasant and polite and all that, even though the two of us are sitting in a chilly meeting room at the Four Seasons Hotel that could easily have accommodated another dozen reporters. But he’s not as fast and loose as he was when he came to Boston five years ago to promote the western he had directed, Open Range, nor when he had met a whole theater full of reporters and fans for a preview of the unedited version of his baseball film, For Love of the Game, when he brought it to Boston the morning of the All-Star Game at Fenway Park in July 1999.

His mind, at first, seems to be somewhere else, even though as a producer of Swing Vote he has a financial stake in doing his best to promote it. In the film he plays loveable loser Bud Johnson, whose 12-year-old daughter, Molly, insists that the disinterested Bud vote in that day’s presidential election. But things go awry in a lot of ways in Bud’s life, at the polling station and in the nation at large, and before you know it, the fate of the man who will be the next president of the United States hinges on Bud’s lone vote.

For Costner this morning, however, the adrenaline doesn’t really begin to kick in until he starts talking about his western-rock band, Modern West, something which clearly is near and dear to his heart, and about the toll fame takes on a world famous actor’s personal life.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that somewhere in the middle of the conversation a plate of bagels arrives. Costner eagerly digs in, apologizing for eating in the middle of the interview while munching heartily on a chewy slice. He seems famished. He hasn’t had breakfast yet, even though it’s almost 9:30. Then he explains his weariness with: “I was up all night with my 14-month-old who has a 103 temperature and we’ve been really worried about him. He would just cry and cry and cry and he can’t tell you what’s wrong and he was as hot as hell.”

Because the hotel had no doctor on call, the 53-year-old Academy Award-winning Costner and his wife, German model and handbag designer Christine Baumgartner, had gotten the name of the nearest emergency room just in case little Cayden Wyatt Costner had to be rushed there. Thankfully, the little boy’s condition later improved.

Cayden marks the third go-round at playing father for Costner, who calls himself an expert with a diaper. He has three grown children from his 16-year marriage to college sweetheart Cindy Silva (24-year-old daughter Annie was graduated from Brown University a few years ago and is still living in Rhode Island, which Costner sometimes visits), as well as a 12-year-old son from a post-divorce relationship with Bridget Rooney.

So because Swing Vote is as much about a father and daughter as it is about politics, Costner is asked whether it was difficult getting started all over again with his own young child.

“No, not at all,” he says, brightening. “Once he landed, it felt like he’d always been there,” he says of his young son.

“You’re constantly throwing looks at him. You’re changed. You just can’t help it. That’s the way it is,” he says, going into a reverie about all the troubles a young child can get into if a parent isn’t always on guard.

It’s that parent-child relationship in Swing Vote that appealed to Costner to sign on as both the star and co-producer. Yet although his company produced the film, Costner says there was never any thought that anyone except Joshua Michael Stern, who wrote the screenplay with Jason Richman, would direct.

Costner has Academy Awards for producing and directing the 1990 western epic Dances With Wolves, capping a string of hits as an actor that included Silverado, The Untouchables, No Way Out, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams. He also was the uncredited director of 1995’s long-in-production Waterworld, while getting outright directing credit for the critically panned The Postman and the critically praised Open Range.

But Costner says Stern was already set to direct Swing Vote by the time he came aboard. His decision to star in and produce came largely on the strength of the very first scene when daughter Molly, played by Madeline Carroll, tries to rouse Bud out of bed and get him off to work down at the egg plant. “Right from the start you knew that somehow these roles had gotten reversed … that she had to take care of a lot of things that she shouldn’t have had to. And it just kept up. I think that’s what appealed to me,” says Costner. “It dealt with a relationship between a father and a daughter in a very smart, fun way — compassionate and yet kind of hurtful and everything else.

“And it also dealt with politics in a funny, smart way.”

Part of the fun of the politically savvy Swing Vote is seeing how both the Republican incumbent president of the United States and his Democratic rival are willing to put aside their entrenched beliefs to persuade Bud to vote for one of them and to put the world’s delicate situation into terms they think Bud can relate to. At one point Kelsey Grammer, as the president, likens thermonuclear war to a football game.

“I think what you’re going after in this comedy — and make no mistake, it’s a comedy — is whether both men vying for the biggest job on the planet would be willing to alter themselves if the election were reduced to a base of one.”

Costner is reminded that in the heat of the real-life campaign battle for the Republican nomination, both Mitt Romney and John McCain changed long-held positions on a number of topics. “Yeah, and think if it came down to a single person,” the actor adds.

Yet surprisingly Swing Vote, which seems especially timely in this election year, is very careful not to take the side of one political party over the other. “That would have been unfair, to demonize one group,” Costner says evenly.

As for himself, Costner calls himself an independent voter. “Aren’t we all independents really?” he asks. “Doesn’t that seem where we all should start, at ground zero, and then lean toward who we think is the brightest?”

He says that so far no politician has approached him for his support. “No, ’cause they don’t want the answer,” he says with a smile, while coyly adding that although he will make up his mind on the 2008 election at some point, he’s not sure whether he will make a public announcement. “I might . . . and I might not. It just depends. That’s the neat thing about voting. It all goes on behind the curtain.”

Beyond politics and father-daughter relationships, the film also takes a hard-edged look at the price of instant celebrity. When it’s announced to the world that the entire presidential election hinges on Bud’s lone vote, a spotlight is thrown onto Bud’s life, literally. He awakens to discover hundreds of reporters gathered outside his trailer home, their spotlights, cameras and microphones aimed at his door. “I know that to be very real,” says Costner, who has been in the spotlight ever since Silverado 23 years ago.

While Bud is inadvertently caught up in a media maelstrom in Swing Vote, Costner says that for an actor media frenzy can “happen if you put yourself in the middle of those situations. You should make no mistake. The people you are constantly seeing [in the tabloids and magazines] are putting themselves constantly in that situation and making sure that [photographers] know where they’re at.”

He says that if he leaves his 17-acre horse ranch in Santa Barbara County to visit “a trendy restaurant in Los Angeles, when I come out there will be 15 or 20 people there. Sometimes there’ll be more. And they’re relentless. They’re not going to stop. There’s not a journalist in that group. It’s mostly photographers and would-be ‘reporters’ who have the video cameras and they’re trying to make you talk. It’s obnoxious. It’s bad.

“But you put yourself in that spot,” he adds, saying that one of his recent very public appearances came about because it was the opening of a friend’s new restaurant. “So I went.”

Costner leads a life that few of us can imagine. “I can walk down a street anywhere in the world and people will say, ‘Hey, Kev.’ But I have always been able to walk down any street in the world and have my life, although there are certain countries where they just won’t leave you alone. Italy is one of them. It’s relentless. But I end up finding a way of [going out in public unnoticed] because I want to do it. Otherwise, I would be surrounded by bodyguards.”

He was planning to attend a Red Sox game at Fenway Park that night, but says, “I don’t let people know I’m going to be there. I’ve had enough attention for a lifetime. I don’t beg for it. I go. People are respectful to me. They nod and say they appreciate the movies.” Sometimes, though, a knot of people will approach him for autographs and pictures “which can create a scene in this little area of a ballpark. And other people start to shout, ‘Sit down!’ And that’s exactly what they should do, sit down.”

In cases where a TV camera operator discovers he’s at a game and a live picture of him pops up on the park’s Jumbotron, “That’s not comfortable for me. I don’t need the attention.”

Yet isn’t attention something all actors crave, one of the reasons they got into show business?

“That’s not it for an actor,” Costner protests. “Any actor I know that can’t be about it. Being an actor is about identifying with the part and really trying to get at the truth.

“Trying to get noticed is about supporting your career. It’s about something else. There’s obviously a value to being in the magazines all the time. But it’s not a road I’ve chosen to go down. I’ve been in those magazines. But I don’t find myself thinking that if I’m not in ’em, I’ve got to figure out how to get in ’em.”

However, he of course realizes the value of a name that can help sell a product. He laughs that although his band is named Modern West, sometimes a club owner will advertise it as “Kevin Costner and Modern West.”

“That’s the way it goes,” he says easily. “If they say, ‘Kevin, it would make it easier to bring in customers if we use your name up front,’ what am I supposed to do? Say, ‘No, I’m not going to make it easier on you’? You’re taking the risk. Call it what you want. We call it that. They call it this.”

He’s the lead singer of Modern West, which he describes as “rock with a western feel.” Costner, as well as the rest of the band members, write their own songs, only doing occasional covers of artists they like. “I believe in stories, so our songs really are stories,” he explains. Sometimes they’ll do 15 songs a night. “We would play for three hours if they wanted us to.”

When Costner is making a movie or is on a press tour, the band comes along. It’s Modern West that plays in a party scene in Swing Vote. It has toured in Turkey, Italy, Germany and all over the U.S. and Canada. It will have an album out in October, probably called Untold Truths. On his national swing for Swing Vote, the band played Daytona, Raleigh-Durham and Springfield, Mo.

“The great thing is the back and forth with the audience,” he says animatedly. “To reminisce a little bit about things and then to play these songs and hope they’re the songs that have a relevance to the audience that night.”

He seems to be enjoying every minute of it.

“My life,” he adds, “it’s been interesting. It’s been really . . . interesting. It’s been as adventurous as the movies.”