Who’s as frayed as Virginia Woolf? Lots of people, apparently. The Hours tells the stories of three women, including the British author, each at the end of her rope. That these somber situations make for a suspenseful, exciting, even uplifting spectacle is an astonishing and moving triumph.

Based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel, which in turn was inspired by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours updates Woolf’s modernist project of showing the drama inherent in even one day in the interior life of an ordinary person. The film interlaces the parallel stories of a day in each of three lives: Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman), on the day in 1923 that she starts to write the novel; 1950s California housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), who reads Woolf’s book while preparing with her little boy to celebrate her husband’s birthday; and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a present-day Manhattan book editor, who is scrambling to arrange a party at her home, like namesake Clarissa Dalloway.

As the hours of each woman’s day pass, the movie cross-cuts among them to show each coming to a crisis point, reaching out in desperation to another person, reevaluating her own unfulfilled life, and changing that life irrevocably by leaping into the unknown. In Woolf’s case, it means breaking free of the isolation of the lifeless London suburb to which husband Leonard has exiled them in order to preserve her tenuous mental health. For Laura, it’s confronting the feeling that she’s trapped in a domestic life that’s destroying her by suppressing yearnings she can’t even name. And for Clarissa, it’s recognizing that her clinging attachment to old flame Richard (Ed Harris), a poet who’s dying of AIDS, has been more detrimental than helpful to both of them.

Haunted by self-destruction, AIDS, mental illness, and collapsed birthday cakes, The Hours may be the feel-bad movie of the season, and that’s saying a lot in a season that’s included movies as bleak as Far from Heaven, About Schmidt, Solaris, and Pinocchio. Mrs. Dalloway, too, was a story haunted by regret and the specter of suicide, but that was balanced by the sense that each of us, no matter how isolated, is connected to a larger world. The movie’s structure, as calibrated by director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, makes those connections explicit, usually through repeated (and sometimes obvious) imagery — a bouquet of flowers, the cracking of eggs. (This is your brain. This is your brain on suicidal depression. Any questions?) But the structure also makes for dramatic tension and suspense, as disaster looms for each woman.

The Hours is replete with unassailable and surprising performances, from the supporting players (particularly Harris, unusually mordant as the stricken poet, and Toni Collette, as a friend of Laura’s who has her own painful secret) to the three leads. Streep is her typically inventive self, creating drama in a role whose inner conflict might otherwise go unseen. Moore, in a more intense variation on her Far from Heaven role, plays Laura like a sleepwalker trying to awaken from a nightmare, and her scenes with the remarkable child actor (Jack Rovello) who plays her son are heartbreaking.

Most striking, though is Kidman, who’s made a career out of charismatic portrayals of often unlikable characters (from To Die For to last year’s The Birthday Girl). She disappears into the role of Woolf, not just because of the putty nose and the wig that disguise her appearance, but because she draws on some deep reserve of power that bubbles up through her unearthly stare and makes her scenes, whether she’s raging or in good humor, scary and exciting.

Despite its focus on women, this is not a chick flick, in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood sense, of easy, self-congratulatory, women-rock-men-are-pigs sentiment. It’s a film about feelings of entrapment and desperation that anyone can recognize, one that says that those who have such grim, solitary feelings are not alone. It takes a certain bravery not just to make such a movie but to assert, as characters in all three segments do, that there’s something heroic in opting out, in dying. Then again, the movie also makes the case that there’s something even more heroic in opting in, in living.