Friday Night Lights

This jittery but highly watchable sports film is not quite up to the smash-mouth dynamism of Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, nor to the sociological insight of the unjustly neglected documentary Go Tigers! into the import of high school football mania in a depressed town (there Massillon OH, here Odessa TX.) But there’s a lot they didn’t mess up in adapting H.G. Bissinger’s nonfiction bestseller, about the 1988 Permian Panthers and their erratic march to the Texas state championship game in the Astrodome . Director Peter Berg does not dress it up or dumb it down too much, does not indulge overmuch in either celebration or desecration of the game and the passions it arouses. The kids are generally believable (Derek Luke a particular delight), and Billy Bob Thornton makes the coach more complex than you expect. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-70, RT-81.)