Friday Night Lights

Universal Pictures

PG-13

105 minutes

Grade A <

The rhapsodic hyperbole, the media scrutiny, the fan obsession. No, we’re not talking about the Boston Red Sox at playoff time. This is Texas high school football, and exaggeration is impossible.

From the big cities to the smallest wind-swept towns, it really is a way of life. H.G. ‘Buzz’ Bissinger captured it with eloquence and evocative detail in his 1990 bestseller, ‘Friday Night Lights’ – and director Peter Berg does it again in his film of the same name.

It’s easy to overdramatize the heroism and heartache of a sports movie, but Berg, who adapted Bissinger’s book with screenwriter David Aaron Cohen, resists the urge and goes in the opposite direction.

The focus is on Permian High School football in the West Texas city of Odessa, both on the field and in the locker room. The look is stripped down and bleached out, making the already parched landscape of oil fields and scrub brush seem even bleaker, though in a strikingly beautiful way. The soundtrack is an eclectic mix of old-school rap, rock and punk, including the truly inspired use of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ during the Permian Panthers’ gutsy second half in the 1988 state championship.

There is an awful lot of action, though – the football scenes have a bone-jarring realism thanks to stunt coordinator Allan Graf, a former USC offensive lineman who also choreographed the plays in ‘Any Given Sunday’ and ‘Jerry Maguire’ – but sometimes at the expense of character development.

For example, the book focused more on Brian Chavez, Permian’s star tight end who went on to Harvard and is now a lawyer in Odessa. Here, he’s a barely fleshed-out supporting character played by ‘Crazy/Beautiful’ co-star Jay Hernandez.

Bissinger, who happens to be Berg’s second cousin, also spent more time exploring the racial and socio-economic rifts that existed both within Odessa in the late 1980s and between Odessa and rival Midland, a wealthier, whiter town 20 miles east.

But Berg does faithfully depict the be-all, end-all element of high school football in places like this, where literally every store shuts down on Friday nights and the 20,000 people packing the stadium all have some opinion on how the coach should run the team.

As the under-pressure Coach Gaines, Billy Bob Thornton continues to show he can bring nuance to any role. Thornton doesn’t turn the character into a clich