If not exactly an epic of adventure and romance, the Hilary Swank vehicle “Amelia” - or “Boys Don’t Fly,” as no doubt many will call it - is nonetheless a sweet film about adventure and romance. Based on two biographies, it tells the story of the life of Amelia Earhart (Swank, “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Million Dollar Baby”) starting in 1928, when she was a reluctant passenger aboard a plane crossing the Atlantic. It ends in 1937, when her twin-engined Lockheed Electra was lost in the South Pacific with her and celestial navigator Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston) aboard on the final leg of an unprecedented voyage to circumnavigate the globe by airplane.

In between, Amelia, eerily evoked by two-time Academy Award winner Swank, falls in love with

publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere), to whom she says, “See ya,” as she departs on her latest aeronautical adventure, has a whirlwind romance with fellow flying enthusiast Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), father of Gore, takes America by storm and inspires a clothing line.

Mira Nair, director of the near-great adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (2006), and screenwriters Ron Bass (“Snow Falling on Cedars”) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (“Girl, Interrupted”) pound the theme of Earhart’s absolute need for personal and physical freedom rather like a bludgeon.

But Swank, sporting freckles and a strawberry blond bob, and silver-haired Gere give their scenes together that elusive quality we call chemistry. Also marvelous are visions of art deco-era flying machines, glowing in glorious yellow-orange, flaming red and polished silver, lyrically shot scenes by Stuart Dryburgh (“The Painted Veil”) depicting Earhart’s world-spanning flights and the lushly romantic score by Gabriel Yared.

Swank’s Earhart, notably embodied by Amy Adams in the recent “Night at the Museum [trailer]: Battle of the Smithsonian,” is a modest, boyish Midwestern girl with a Kansas twang in her voice and steel in her spine. The steel, which Swank has demonstrated ably in past roles, is what made it possible for Earhart to become “Lady Lindy,” among the first female pilots in a man’s club and “the most famous woman in America,” even more famous than Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), whom she befriends in the film and takes for a moonlit ride over the Capitol.

“Amelia” is not the equal of Billy Wilder’s sadly neglected “The Spirit of St. Louis,” a 1957 film about Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart). But it is almost its equal in terms of removing shades of gray from its portrait.

Swank, who is also the film’s executive producer, continues to indulge her talent for gender-defying roles. Her performance here is one for which actors are deservedly nominated for awards. In spite of her occasional missteps (“The Affair of the Necklace,” “The Reaping” anyone?), Swank, like the film itself, is a throwback to the days when Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn strode the soundstages of Hollywood and played women who broke men’s hearts as well as their social barriers.

And like them she is almost always a joy to watch.

Rated PG-13. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters.

(“Amelia” contains off-color language, alcohol use, smoking and a hootchie-dancing torch singer.)