"And this is a very sexy school," says Redford, a ruggedly youthful septuagenarian, before gentling the conversation back to his film.
"We're good at engagement outside our country, but not so good within it," Redford says about his most political movie since All the President's Men, which came out in 1976, a decade before most of these Penn students were born.
Lions, a triptych starring Meryl Streep as a skeptical journalist, Tom Cruise as a U.S. senator selling his new military initiative in Afghanistan, and Redford as a professor prodding a passive student toward activism, is the filmmaker's challenge to the YouTube generation.
It indicts the media for not informing, students for not performing, elected officials for not leading, and the country for not educating its youth. All in 90 minutes.
"Get active!" the figure in jeans and cowboy boots exhorts the cheering crowd.
From the stage, flanked by actors Michael Pea and Andrew Garfield, who play his students in the film, Redford paraphrases the words of his character, professor Stephen Malley: "It is better to try and fail than to fail to try. Political and social change is going to come from you." The audience eats it up like idealism-infused popcorn.
"Fascinating," murmurs Eugene Numoo, a Penn senior from Ghana and a cinema studies major. "He made this movie for students just like us."
Just as fascinating is how Lions for Lambs reconciles the decades-old Redford Paradox. In it, for perhaps the first time in his movie career, the figure Redford plays on screen is as passionate, funny and garrulous as he is off-screen.
In life this most aloof of idols, famously "the man who does not engage," as his director-chum Sydney Pollack (The Way We Were, Out of Africa) put it, isn't as detached as his screen persona.
