Los Angeles — Handshakes are for wimps.

When Josh Brolin climbs out of his dark blue Dodge Ram pickup and strides into his neighborhood eatery, the Napa Valley Grille, he greets you with a body-slamming bear hug. He asks if you're hungry, where you're from, where you went to college and what kind of dog you have.

A powerful set of people skills and a gift for gab are about the only things Brolin has in common with George W. Bush, whom he plays in Oliver Stone's "W.," opening today. Ask Brolin about embodying the president, and he seems a little stupefied it even happened.

"I just saw him on the news, before I came here, and he's talking about the economy and $700 billion, and he's (messing) up the words. And I was like, 'Man, I can't believe I played this guy.' That's the zeitgeist."

If you're looking for a dinner date, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more entertaining one than Brolin. He tells a great yarn.

There's the story of how his kids Trevor, 20, and Eden, 15, recently traveled around Europe, stopping in Spain, home of his "No Country for Old Men" co-star Javier Bardem. Brolin asked Bardem to show them around Madrid, and instead of a polite spin around the Spanish capital, Bardem and girlfriend Pen...lope Cruz spent three days with the young Brolins (from Brolin's first marriage to Alice Adair), which included exposing them to the passions of a soccer game.

And there's his starry-eyed recollection of meeting Marlon Brando at a dinner years ago, complete with a dead-on impersonation of the legendary actor trying to recall Vivien Leigh's name.

He'll even speak in the Bush twang, albeit reluctantly, after a glass of wine. "Rarely is the question asked, 'Is our children learning?' " Brolin drawls. "There you go. I feel like a whore right now."

Actually, Brolin, 40, is anything but a hack for hire. After years of being known largely as James Brolin's son, he is riding a wave of acclaim for playing stalwart cowboy Llewelyn Moss in the Oscar-winning "No Country for Old Men" and a crooked cop in "American Gangster." And now, he tackles Bush in a film directed by the outspoken Hollywood veteran who directed "JFK" and "Nixon."

Brolin says he's intensely proud of "W.," shot in Shreveport, La., and rushed into theaters before the Nov. 4 election. It features an A-list cast with James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Elizabeth Banks as first lady Laura Bush and Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. The film doesn't overtly bash Bush and explores what prompted the Texan to seek the presidency in the first place.

Brolin "found the human being. He found the internal conflict. He holds the film together," Cromwell says. "Josh really threw himself into the role and tried with compassion to find something in that extraordinary human being to latch on to."

Brolin at first had no desire to be Bush. There's the question of his own political beliefs, which don't quite mesh with those of Bush. And his stepmother, Barbra Streisand, is what one might call an ardent Democrat.

"I had such a visceral reaction against it. But then I thought about it, and I had to get up and read the script. I read it one morning, and I thought it was amazing. I didn't love the story, but as a character, following a guy from 21 to 58 was an incredible challenge for an actor that I didn't think I could pull off," Brolin says.

The most difficult? Nailing both Bush's distinctive walk and his Texas accent, which shifts from his years at Yale to his time in the White House. Brolin learned about 25 of Bush's speeches "so I could go around and talk. Instead of having to improvise, I had his words to say."

The role-prep stress made Brolin break out in hives, and the pressure spilled over to his wife, actress Diane Lane.

"My wife got so mad at me one time. We were on a plane from Hawai'i, and I'm supposed to learn all these frat names. So I'm covered in spots, and the whole flight back, I'm trying to figure out these mnemonics for these 40 names." He muttered to himself for most of the flight. Then Lane spoke up: " 'You have to stop. It looks weird, and it's not normal.' I was obsessed."

Even after filming wrapped, he couldn't part ways with the accent. "He can't let it go," Banks says. "He was telling me a joke the other day, and he started to sound like Bush in regular conversation. He's like, 'It won't leave me.' It's haunting him."

During filming, Brolin rented a small house and immersed himself in the character. "I shut everything off. I didn't want to think about anything else. I went out to eat twice the whole time I was in Shreveport."

He pauses a beat. "One time, I went to jail for it."

In July, Brolin and Wright made headlines after they were arrested at Shreveport's Stray Cat Bar after a confrontation with police; Brolin was charged with a misdemeanor. Brolin and Wright are scheduled to appear in court Dec. 2.

Stone, no shrinking violet himself, calls the whole brawl "hilarious. Josh had not had a drink in about three or four months."

Wright, he adds, "was not drunk. I saw him being arrested in the bar. I was drunk. I was in the bar. There was a hundred of us in the bar. I saw Jeffrey being pulled out in handcuffs. Then Josh went out because (Wright) went out. Josh had had a few. He just said, 'What are you doing to my friend Jeffrey?' They sprayed him right away" with Mace.

Brolin doesn't hide behind a "no comment."

"I've gotten into trouble in my life, for sure, but I've never seen anything like this. We'd just finished (filming) I think four hours before and had a couple of drinks. Jeffrey got into something with the bartender. Suddenly he told me, 'I think they're calling the cops.' I went to the bathroom. When I came out, he was being escorted out. All I wanted to know was where (they were) taking him. I met him outside. I remember thinking, 'Mace is bouncing off my eyeballs. This is unbelievable.' A lot of people got arrested for asking questions. There was no fight. I've spent a lot of time in Texas myself, a lot of time in the South. I've never seen anything this extreme. I've never seen it escalate so quickly."

Brolin finds the humor in the situation. "That's what was written all over the place: Brolin goes insane playing George Bush."