Where football is more than a game

Once a week, September into December, the town of Odessa, Texas - an unpretty swath of mini-malls, trailer parks and modest homes ringed by flat, scrubby desert - comes to life. That's when the Permian High School Panthers play football.

Friday Night Lights, a smart, sharp, stirring adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger best-seller about one season - 1988 - in the West Texas burg, examines the ferocious subculture of high school athletics, and how a whole community is measured, and measures itself, on the performance of its beloved team of gridiron teens.

Focusing on six players and their coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), who has to discipline, drive, chasten and occasionally console his squad of pumped-up young men, the movie rocks and rolls with a mix of thwacking game sequences, practice-drill mini-dramas, and keenly observed domestic scenes. When the varsity quarterback, Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), eats a predawn breakfast in his tiny, cluttered kitchen, his mother (Connie Cooper) is there in his face, clutching the Panthers playbook, grilling her son on the calls.

Come kickoff time, signs pop up in the car dealerships and stores around Odessa: "Closed - Gone to Game." The talk-radio station is crackling with pregame and postgame analyses, praise for the Panthers when they're good, moans and groans - and tirades - when they're bad.

Directed by Peter Berg, the actor who made his behind-the-camera debut on the nasty black comedy Very Bad Things, Friday Night Lights has none of the Hollywood-y uplift of 2000's high school football pic, Remember the Titans. (The issue of race, central to that film, enters Lights in one telling scene when coaches and principals from two rival schools, one whose student body is predominantly African American, negotiate the site and staffing for a big game.)

Friday Night Lights doesn't judge its subjects, or condescend to them. It respects the kids, parents and fans - flaws and all. Country music star Tim McGraw's turn as a drunken, abusive onetime Panthers star who puts unconscionable pressure on his wide-receiver son (Garrett Hedlund) isn't a pretty thing to watch, but it feels real.

Likewise, the not-so-subtle suggestion offered to Coach Gaines by the town's movers and shakers that he'll be out of a job if his team doesn't win a state championship takes place in a chain-store parking lot; it's not some overblown moment of melodrama, no reeling close-ups, no uh-oh film-score chords.

As for Thornton, his study of the soft-spoken, watchful Gaines is grounded in the real world, with scenes at home with his wife (Connie Britton) and daughter; with wary stares into the eyes of a star running back (a very good Derek Luke) who may have suffered a serious injury but is telling his coach otherwise.

And the actor's pivotal halftime speech - with his players assembled in the locker room, bruised and beaten, down by touchdowns - is a thing to behold. With unwavering gentleness, Thornton's Coach Gaines talks about perfection and love and being in the moment. It's tobacco-chewin' Texas Zen, and it's one of the reasons Friday Night Lights is more than just another football movie - although, as football movies go, it's a great one.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.

Friday Night Lights

*** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Brian Grazer, directed by Peter Berg, written by Berg and David Aaron Cohen, based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, photography by Tobias Schliessler, music by Explosions In the Sky, distributed by Universal Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 mins.

Gary Gaines. . . Billy Bob Thornton

Mike Winchell. . . Lucas Black

Boobie Miles. . . Derek Luke

Don Billingsley. . . Garrett Hedlund

Charlie Billingsley. . . Tim McGraw

Parent's guide: PG-13 (profanity, violence, sex, adult themes)

Playing at: area theaters