Howard Hawks provided the perfect definition for a good movie: Three great scenes, no bad scenes. “Seabiscuit” bestows no truly awful moments, though it hardly provides any scenes that could be labeled great.

“Seabiscuit” is a film that is, for the most part, very good. It has bold characters and a rousing story backed by fantastic horse racing sequences — though none of these scenes ever provide its viewer a moment when one realizes he or she is watching a exceptional movie.

This is a problem because “Seabiscuit” is trying hard to be a film full of these elements.

Jeff Bridges stars as millionaire Charles Howard, a car salesman who made his fortune by introducing the automobile to western America. After his child’s death and the crumbling of his marriage, Howard eventually finds a new love in a younger woman (Elizabeth Banks) and a horse named Seabiscuit.

Teaming up with an aging horse trainer (Chris Cooper) and an ex-prize fighter (Tobey Maguire), Howard and company gain national attention as their knobbly-kneed horse gallops his way to numerous victories.

What I like most about “Seabiscuit” is its flow along a noble, reoccurring line: “You don’t throw a life away just because it’s banged up a little.”

“Seabiscuit” is about characters who live by this principle: Bridges plays a man who lost everything but found it again; Maguire plays a young man who defies odds despite being half-blind, and the title character himself — a lazy, disproportional nag who overcomes the highest of improbabilities.

Bridges and Cooper are both first-rate in their roles. Bridges brings a confident swagger to his role reminiscent of his lazy, self-assured performance as the Dude in “The Big Lebowski.”

Cooper provides the strongest performance of the film: Reserved and humorous, he’s within the boundaries of his otherwise under-written role.

The film’s horse race sequences are the real talk of “Seabiscuit.” They’re riveting, fast-paced and even more slickly edited. If nothing else, this film should garner an editing Oscar nomination.

With these things considered, “Seabiscuit” is a mild disappointment. Much of the film is obsessed with its own glossy narrative.

Although it’s a brisk two hours and 20 minutes, “Seabiscuit” trips over its multiple narration.

Whether its photographs commenting on the time patched with weepy music, the wispy voice-over of David McCullough or annoying implementation of William H. Macy’s frantic radio personality, it’s easy to spot where mind-numbing moments of digression could have been cut.

Tobey Maguire’s producing is obvious, his quest to further himself from teenage roles apparent in the usage of someone only ten years younger than him to play his character at 16.

If Bridges can pull off playing himself as a 20-year-old, why can’t Maguire put himself into smaller shoes as he has done in every one of his past movies? If one complements his supposed range, how can this aspect not be considered?

Either way, Maguire’s presence doesn’t behold much to talk about. The performance isn’t a far cry from the goofy-does-it grin he starts every sentence as he did in “Pleasantville” or “Spider-Man.”

Along with Maguire, the solid performances of Bridges and Cooper do not always overcome the heavily sentimental, often-corny script. The film spends too much time on character exposition only to ignore most of the convictions we have been sold on the film’s first half.

I can’t seem to find a rightful comparison to “Seabiscuit” other than coincidence of my watching of it in same weekend is “Bugsy,” the Warren Beatty-Annette Bening biopic on the celebrity gangster Benjamin Siegel.

Both films take place around the same time period and both feel like movies of the time, only with more racy sexual situations and colorful profanity implemented into them.

This is the aspect that makes “Bugsy” work so well — the film offers 1940s-style dialogue and the kind of bickering fights you’d see between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Also, like “Seabiscuit,” we learn a substantial amount about the main characters in the first half.

Unlike “Bugsy,” “Seabiscuit” doesn’t put the character exposition to good use. “Bugsy” makes the convictions and beliefs we’ve learned about the people we’re watching, “Seabiscuit” does nothing with the things we’ve learned. Characters, who are nothing more than cardboard-thin by the story’s end, have become nothing more than people who speak in bumper stickers.

“Seabiscuit” tries to work on similar levels, but doesn’t because it’s trying too hard to be of old-style grandeur. The old Hollywood feel it tries to present is too bogged down by the hokey script, music queued to the emotion we’re supposedly feeling and presenting everything that should be kept a secret into it’s lucrative trailer.

Even though it’s the opposite of virtually every other summer movie — lacking car chases and shoot-outs and containing a plot — “Seabiscuit” cannot be commended solely on these elements. It’s a good idea that bows to an exercise of glossy arrogance primed for Oscar nominations.

Though this horse gallops at a high speed when hitting its stride, “Seabiscuit” races around the track of Hollywood conventionalism.