Shoeless and sinking fast, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is swept down by the current of the shallow, weedy river she lowered herself into just 18 years after writing “Mrs. Dalloway” in the opening scene of “The Hours,” a movie adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel.

This current — dark, seaweed-laden and ominous — runs through the entire film and replaces the rhythm of Woolf’s book with that of a self-propelling blood flow, one uninterrupted by beating heart.

Although it was the beating, clockwork-like formality of “Mrs. Dalloway” from which Cunningham spun his trio of stories in “The Hours,” the new movie version of his text works with Woolf’s intended modernist themes and shifts them forward into a new medium that is worthy of its abounding awards hype but defies modern definitions of “blockbuster.”

When Cunningham struck a publishing deal for his 1998 novel, he not only felt fortunate, but flattered. He figured he had written a quirky triptych that would find a small audience in select literary circles.

Instead, his book found itself labeled a New York Times bestseller, then a Pulitzer Prize winner, and now it has been crafted into a Golden Globe-winning movie.

If it did not so neatly follow Cunningham’s structure, the film’s repetitious splicing together of three locations and four time periods would seem unduly knarled. But the set of scenes — present-day New York, where a self-sufficient editor (Meryl Streep) plans a party for a friend dying of AIDS; Los Angeles in 1951, where a cookie-cutter housewife (Julianne Moore) begins to be smothered by her perfect family and home; and Richmond, England, in 1923, where Woolf jots the first lines of “Mrs. Dalloway” and then, 18 years later, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself — are laced together with every imaginable thread, such that their composite forms a misty web.

This haze of a composition, however, had much to overcome.

With nearly a century of momentum behind the book, the writer (David Hare) and director (Stephen Daldry) of “The Hours” faced the task of simplifying not one brilliant author’s complexity, but two. Although Cunningham succeeded in absorbing, then plucking up the best of “Mrs. Dalloway” for evocation in his novel, upon a third rendering, much of Woolf’s original thematic beauty is lost in the movie adaptation of “The Hours.”

In crafting “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1923, Woolf sought to capture all of a woman’s life in one day, lacing Clarissa Dalloway’s party-planning day in bustling London with ticking clocks, sirens and the chimes of Big Ben, which, when layered with the confining structure of her self-imposed hostess duties, seem to epitomize for Woolf a woman’s struggle.

This struggle can be seen any day, and it is just one day on which Clarissa decides she will buy the flowers for the party herself that her life is scrutinized.

Cunningham’s revisitation takes up a handful of Woolf’s themes and pushes them forth along the modernist trajectory she and her contemporaries foreshadowed. Feminism embodied in homosexuality, the individual versus the collective and the contribution that the dead give the living are a few of the themes he sustained.

What the new film does best is visualize the meshing and mixing Woolf and her contemporaries worked so hard to create in the literature of the 1920s. The only components of the movie that do not seem to play upon every other — as the themes, characterizations and individual plot actions do –are those revered as making cinema today great.

The dreary musical score (by Phillip Glass, who won a Golden Globe for his score for “The Truman Show”) does not seem out of place, but coupled with the lack of progressive cinematography, it dulls the picture in unintended ways.

Woolf worked to create new literary genres, and Cunningham paid tribute in a postmodern way. It is disappointing that the media leap could not be made in a forward-thinking way.

Perhaps seeing Kidman sans makeup is progressive in itself, and her acting never falters. A rich supporting cast of men is perhaps what makes the film’s story work more deeply than most book adaptations do. Ed Harris plays Richard Brown, a dying poet the 2001 Clarissa has taken up to care for as part of her daily life.

The character Richard, though named for Clarissa Dalloway’s husband in Woolf’s book, mirrors a shell-shocked WWI veteran named Septimus Smith from the 1923 novel.

Septimus, always paired with extensively winding semi-train-of-thought sentences, vocalizes the subconscious and seems to turn the character of Clarissa inside out, representing her internal struggle. Richard does the same for Clarissa in 2001.

Perhaps another Septimus surrogate is the WWII-veteran husband of Moore’s character (John C. Reilly).

Some big-screen exaggeration must be noted: Although Clarissa in “Mrs. Dalloway” is haunted at age 50 by memories of close female friendship from her youth, and a discontent-with-sexuality undertone is taken up by the novel, “The Hours” in movie form slaps lesbianism in the audience’s face. Each powerful female in the film kisses another. Desire is played up, but fortunately the discontent causing it is not altogether lost.

Some thematic beauty is lost, but overall, it will be the film’s melancholy that could lead to its box office demise: How much profound sobriety can a 21st century moviegoer take?

“The Hours” awards hype seems fortunate. Having a Golden Globe in its arsenal will surely attract more viewers than Cunningham ever anticipated.