Rated R. At AMC Boston Common, Landmar Kendall Square and suburban theaters.

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin has pulled off quite a coup with “Being the Ricardos.” The film zeroes in on the hot political issue of its era, limiting itself to one week in the life of an episode of “I Love Lucy,” the beloved CBS-TV series watched by some 60 million Americans in the early 1950s.

The series has been in syndication virtually forever all over the world, so almost every generation has been exposed to it. The burning question of the Sorkin film is: Was Lucille Ball a member of the Communist Party as influential columnist Walter Winchell claims in a Sunday night radio broadcast? Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale), the executive producer of “I Love Lucy,” its sponsor Philip Morris, CBS, the show’s stars and powers behind the camera Lucile Ball (Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman) and her Cuban-born husband Desi Arnaz (Academy Award winner Javier Bardem), costars William Frawley (Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons), a veteran of vaudeville, and Vivian Vance (a fine Nina Arianda) and sundry others are on tenterhooks wondering if their show and their futures are going to go up in smoke. To complicate matters, Lucy is pregnant, and the no one thinks that – gasp – Lucy Ricardo will be allowed to be pregnant and have a child on national television.

Lucille Ball and her alter ego Lucy Ricardo are the most popular and beloved women in the United States. The country is lifted on a weekly basis by the physical comedy-based hijinks of Lucy, her comical band leader husband and their TV neighbors Fred and Ethyl Mertz. The film is cleverly divided into parts, beginning with the “table read” of the week’s new show, where the writers Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat), who is played by Linda Lavin as an older woman, and Bob Carroll Jr. (Jake Lacy), who is played as an older man by Ronny Cox (“Deliverance”). In between the days leading up to Friday’s show, we see flashbacks to Lucy’s middling career as an RKO contract player, her courtship by Desi, their shaky marriage, and his frequent nights out “playing cards” and sleeping on his boat.

Former Ziegfeld Girl Lucy, who created and ran Desilu Productions, which produced “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek,” with her husband, is a woman ahead of her time, and Kidman fills her with creative and sensual fire. Lucy is a brilliant and iconic comic actress, whose flair for dreaming up ways to get her TV alter ego into comical predicaments is rightfully legendary. Sorkin portrays her and her husband as the smartest people in a smoke-filled room full of smart and talented people, and Sorkin’s innate respect for the people he has written about (and by association cast and directed) is one of the film’s strong suits. Thankfully, Sorkin’s tendency to overload the dialogue has been restrained, and the man who created “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom” has delivered a whip smart and incisive screenplay. All the actors speak his “Sorkin-ese” with great fluency. “Being the Ricardos” has roots in such films as “All About Eve,” “The Aviator” and more recently “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

It’s a celebration of show business as a metaphor for America and a glamorous hall of mirrors of its inhabitants. The drama – infused with wisecracks and comic banter – involves the threat of political scandal, the survival of Ball and Arnaz’s marriage and the talent, creativity and hard work that goes into making people laugh. Kidman and Bardem have a powerful, complicated chemistry. Bardem is delightfully flamboyant singing ”Babalu” with his band at the legendary West Hollywood nightclub Ciro’s. One of the year’s best, “Being the Ricardos” is proof that we still love Lucy.

(“Being the Ricardos” contains profanity and smoking.)

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