In 'Friday Night Lights,' the football film goes deep

In the movie, the scene from the poster lasts for two seconds and is a lot less ethereal, but the film itself is often just as lyrical, if more melancholy. It contains all the stuff so beautifully absent from the photo, the essential things like testosterone, referees, and the game itself. But it also bears something you rarely experience in a football movie. "Friday Night Lights" has a soul.

Set in the Odessa, Texas, of 1988, a place of ubiquitous oil drills and a seeming cultural barrenness, the movie recounts the true tale of the Permian Panthers and the team's quest for another state title. It walks the standard path that most underdog sports stories take to reach a kind of ragged glory. There's the cocky star running back (Derek Luke), the shy quarterback (Lucas Black, grown up and quite good) with a sick mom (Connie Cooper), and the butterfingers receiver (Garrett Hedlund) with the abusive, drunk dad (Tim McGraw, the country star). Billy Bob Thornton, compassionate in a cooperative hairpiece, plays the coach, and here and there we see Connie Britton as his supportive wife.

There are recruiters, unseen commentators running play by plays, lots of time in the locker room, and the nagging desperation of a town with a population that's counting on the Panthers to make it to the state championships. There's not much in "Friday Night Lights" that you haven't ever seen or couldn't have imagined. Relative to most Hollywood sports movies, however, it just feels new.

The film is based on the moving book the landfaring journalist H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger wrote more than a decade ago. Director Peter Berg, working with expensive-looking production, draws out these lives so you can see how the sport, as it's typically said of Lone Star football, is the regional religion. (In one of the opening scenes, a mother runs plays with her son at breakfast.)