The high school football movie is a curious subgenre of the American sports film, usually consisting of two parts melodrama and one part truth. Like “Friday Night Lights,” most such movies – “Remember the Titans” and “Radio” are but two recent examples – claim to be “based on a true story.” The film version of “Lights” (directed by Peter Berg,a cousin of the books’s author, H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger) is supposed to be the film that subverts that formula. But the film – though a fine one – is a fundamental betrayal of the book’s intentions.

Mr. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights,” published in 1990, chronicled the 1988 season of what was at that time the most dominant sports dynasty in the country, the Panthers of Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. That made it, by definition, a book about high school football everywhere, a game that even then was changing rapidly from a reflection of the heart and soul of small-town America into the lowest level of the farm system for the National Football League.

The book was both a celebration and an indictment of what high school football had become in the West Texas city that Larry McMurtry once described as “the worst town on earth.” The attitude was expressed by one of the Permian players, who told Mr. Bissinger in 1988, “We got two things in Odessa. Oil and football. And oil’s gone. But we still got football, so f- the rest of you.”

The film is a fundamental betrayal of the book’s intentions – it’s the celebration without the indictment. The subtle ways in which the ugliness at the center of big-time high school football are excised from the original material in the script by David Aaron Cohen (apparently with an assist from – or at least the approval of – Mr. Bissinger) turns the movie into “Friday Night Lite.”

“Friday Night Lights” was written, Mr. Bissinger said in an afterward to the 2000 edition, “with enormous affection and empathy, because as deeply troubling as the overemphasis was on high school football, those games were, and always will be, the most exquisite sporting events that I’ve ever experienced.” There was no doubt that the fixation on football “caused the educational system to suffer in the shadows. A shift in priorities was desperately needed. But as a con sequence of that shift, the glory of Permian football has dropped to an all-time low.” Mr. Bissinger’s book helped to bring about that shift, and many locals blamed him for the decline of their football dynasty. (He was forced to cancel book signings in Odessa following threats of bodily harm.)

The film goes all-out to reinvent the illusion that football is a way out for the Odessa boys who play it. Gone is the sentiment Mr. Bissinger attributed to one player that “There had to be something else in life [besides football], if only he could figure out what it was.” Start with the promotional poster for the film. This tells us that “Hope Comes Alive.” Gone is any hint of the destructive system that ignores the players’ academic education in favor of their football potential. In fact, the film never shows a single player in a classroom.

Mr. Bissinger takes great pains in the book to illustrate the lure of college and professional football for blue-chip prospects such as Panthers running back Boobie Miles, whose career was curtailed by a knee injury. Colleges from Notre Dame to Texas to UCLA “gushed and fawned over Boobie, and it was impossible not to be blinded by them. They bragged about their facilities and their winning traditions, and none of them, of course, made any mention of the academic difficulties he would face in college. All they knew about him was that he was big and strong and fearless, and that was enough to cram his head with dreams.”

Mr. Miles came back from his injury to play college football, but flunked out in his sophomore year. The movie makes it appear as if an injury ended his football dreams, making no mention of his academic failure. This movie, I fear, will cram similar dreams into the heads of many more like Boobie Miles.

Most unforgivable is the film’s avoidance of the deep racial divisions among the players and fans of the team. Instead, it suggests that football is some kind of great healer that brings white, black, and Hispanic together. (That same movie poster shows three players – one white, one black and one Hispanic – holding hands as they walk across the 50-yard line.) “We fit as athletes,” said Nate Hearn, Permian’s only black coach, in 1988, to Mr. Bissinger, “but we really don’t fit as part of society. We know that we’re separate, until we get on the field. We know that we’re equal as athletes, but once we get off the field, we’re not equal. When it comes time to play the game, we are a part of it. But after the game, we are not a part of it.”

Brian Chavez – who did end up playing college football, though of the non-scholarship variety, at Harvard – is quoted in the book as saying, “My grandmother says, ‘whites are for whites, Hispanics are for Hispanics, blacks are for blacks.'” Nowhere does the film illustrate one of the ugly truths that is as much a part of high school football in New York or California as in Texas; namely, that “those few blacks attending Permian had made enormous contributions, one after another shipped across town to Permian for the mass enjoyment of an appreciative white audience and then shipped right back again across the railroad tracks to the Southside after each game.”

“Friday Night Lights” puts a nostalgic haze on the post-football lives of these young men, leaving the viewer with the impression that what they learned on the gridiron prepared them for success in life. But most of them did not succeed, at least if one defines success by their own standard: creating a life better than the one they grew up in. Most continued to love football not because of what it taught them about life but in spite of it.

In the film, running back Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund) is tormented by his alcoholic father (who is played, in a very convincing performance, by country singer Tim McGraw): He will never win the championship ring that Dad won when he was in high school. At the end, in what will go down as one of the classic moments in male weepie movie history, Dad slips his ring onto his son’s finger after they lose the big game. The real Don Billingsley moved out of his father’s home after the season ended and spent years battling his own alcoholism.

In the end, this failure of nerve in “Friday Night Lights” makes its sins more grievous than those of the usual Hollywood football movie. It uses its independent-film strategies to reinforce a big-budget, Hollywood ethos.

Finishing Touches

“Friday Night Lights” is better made than any recent film about football. Shot by Tobias Schliessler in handsome, muted colors (the film almost lingers in the memory as having been in black-and-white), it is anchored by a lovely, subdued performance by Billy Bob Thornton as Permian football coach Gary Gaines. Mr. Thornton is the first actor in recent years, up to and including Denzel Washington and Ed Harris, not to play a football coach as a whistle-stop Bear Bryant.

Mr. Berg choreographs the on-field violence well; for once, football seems to be played in real time, not the jerky stop-action that ruins the football sequences in films like the Tom Cruise vehicle, “All the Right Moves.” And, for once, the movie doesn’t end with an improbable last second, game-winning touchdown. (If it spoils the movie for you to know that, you’re not going to like it anyway.)

“Friday Night Lights” is tasteful and respectful of its subject, the very model of what the sporting establishment wants a movie on high school football to be; in fact, that’s exactly what’s wrong with it. But if the film somehow doesn’t succeed at the box office, it will still have a long future as an inspirational feature film for every high school with a football program.