If you thought Texans were nuts in the first place, wait until you get a load of “Friday Night Lights,” director Peter Berg’s no-nonsense ode to prep football in America’s most pigskin-
crazy state.

Based on Buzz Bissinger's bestselling non-fiction book, Berg's movie chronicles the 1988 Permian High School football team’s season in the economically depressed west Texas town of Odessa. Football is more than a sport here; it commands a zealous devotion that feels distinctly religious.

Over breakfast, starting quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black from "Crazy in Alabama") goes over drop-steps and receiver routes with his invalid mother (Connie Cooper). In public, fans bug him for autographs and he grants a photo op to a guy in a mullet. The way primitive cultures used to pray for rain, the good people of Odessa pray for touchdowns.

Billy Bob Thornton (“Armageddon”) plays Permian's even-tempered head coach, Gary Gaines, who submits himself to a grim routine: after every loss, he flips on a radio call-in show where livid fans call for his job.

Thornton's scenes with "Sling Blade" co-star Black are mostly limited to butt-slaps and sideline screaming, but they do share one quasi-poignant, dimly lit moment when Gaines urges Winchell to stand tall in the passing pocket of life.

Permian's all-consuming drive toward the state championship inspires the best and worst in the townfolk. Fed up with his son's chronic fumbling, a deranged has-been father (country music star Tim McGraw) angrily duct-tapes a football to the teenager's hands.

In other stretches, the movie errs towards the ponderous, particularly during screenwriter David Aaron Cohen's banal locker room speeches.

Cohen and co-screenwriter Berg have left certain parts of the book out of the movie — firings, arrest and other tabloidish details — and fudged a little on others; Permian advances farther in the playoffs, for dramatic effect.
Berg — the "Great White Hype" actor and "Very Bad Things" director — employs a liberal use of handheld cameras to capture the smash-mouth grittiness of it all, and rarely do his actors convey anything but total gridiron obsession.

On the rare occasions when they do break out of the spell, the clear-minded contrast makes those scenes all the more powerful. Black is a portrait of helpless longing when Winchell begs an absentee sibling to come home and help take of his mother.

However, it’s co-star Derek Luke (“Antwone Fisher”) who steals the movie as Boobie Miles, the team’s mouthy star running back. In one devastating, brilliantly authentic scene of despair and heartbreak, Miles is forced to contemplate life after football, and is horrified to find no life at all.