Nora Ephron’s new drama concerns the legendary tabloid journalist Mike McAlary, and its Broadway production has the lurid charge and energy of a tabloid newspaper itself. Directed in breakneck fashion by George C. Wolfe and featuring a terrific performance by Tom Hanks in his Broadway debut, Lucky Guy is a wildly entertaining evening.

McAlary, who died of cancer at the age of 41 in 1998, had a hugely successful--if rocky--career in which he see-sawed among New York City’s tabloid papers. Famed for his columns dealing with the NYPD, he blew it on a story involving a purported rape victim that nearly derailed his career. His greatest triumph came shortly before his death, when he broke the Abner Louima story, about the Haitian immigrant who was sodomized by police officers. It won McAlary the Pulitzer Prize.

This story was a longtime passion project for Ephron, who began her writing career as a reporter for the New York Post. She tried unsuccessfully for years to make a feature film based on McAlary’s exploits, with this posthumous theatrical version premiering some nine months after her death.

The work’s cinematic roots are evident in its episodic structure, which covers the major events in the journalist’s life in whirlwind fashion. While the writing never achieves any real depth and is overly dependent on informational tidbits delivered via narration, it has a rollicking wit that helps compensate for its narrative deficiencies.

What pulls the evening together is Wolfe’s fast-paced, careening staging, for which he has assembled a first-rate cast of theater veterans playing such real-life journalistic figures as Michael Daly, Jim Dwyer, Jerry Nachman and McAlary’s longtime editors John Cotter and Hap Hairston. Among those delivering pungently entertaining turns--some in multiple roles--are Danny Mastrogiorgio, Peter Scolari (Hanks’ co-star on the hit sitcom Bosom Buddies), Courtney B. Vance, Richard Masur, Peter Gerety, Deirdre Lovejoy, Brian Dykstra and Christopher McDonald, with Maura Tierney as McAlary’s loving but long-suffering wife, Alice.

And of course, there’s Hanks, who effortlessly brings his likeable, everyman persona to the stage. Unlike so many film stars who flounder when they attempt to trod the boards, Hanks--who began his acting career at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival but hasn’t done any theater work in decades--fully projects the charisma and talent that’s made him one of the foremost screen stars of his generation. Conveying McAlary’s brash cockiness and later the devastating effects of a near fatal car crash and the cancer that eventually killed him, the actor delivers a rich, multi-faceted performance that has the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. A particular highlight is the scene in which he and Vance silently and hilariously depict the rapturous effects of a self-induced morphine injection.

The tawdry atmosphere of New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s is superbly captured in the projections by Batwin + Robin Productions, Inc., while David Rockwell’s minimal set designs effectively depict locales ranging from smoke-filled newsrooms to the Irish bar where the journalists gather to kibbitz in profane fashion and occasionally even break into song.

Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com. Through June 16.