Genre: drama

Radio

Directed by Mike Tollin

Written by Mike Rich

Starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Ed Harris, Alfre Woodard

Classification: PG

Rating: **½

Yet another memo from the Department of Faint Praise: Radio isn't nearly as mawkish as its sappy trailer would suggest. Fuzzy sentiment is definitely the stock-in-trade here, but at least the movie has the good sense to undersell the stuff. The result is a feel-good flick that doesn't make you feel too bad -- in this genre, that almost qualifies as a ringing endorsement.

The story is loosely based on truth and firmly set in the American South of the seventies, the kind of rural town where the old boys still gather to yak at the barber shop and where high-school football is the highest culture around. That makes Coach Jones (Ed Harris) a big man on and off campus; nevertheless, a sensitive redneck, he handles his job with a quiet grace matched to a steely gaze. "We do things as a team, gentlemen," Jones says to his charges, and then sets out to do the thing that gives the picture its plot: to comfort the afflicted and receive comfort in return.

The coach spots his altruistic target languishing at the far reaches of the practice field: A young black man (Cuba Gooding Jr.), mentally handicapped and withdrawn, alone in the world save for the tender ministrations of his hard-working mother. Offering him odd jobs, plying him with a steady diet of burgers and kindness, Jones gradually coaxes the guy out of his shell and into the team's orbit. There, he earns validation and, just as important in athletic circles, a nickname too -- Radio, of course, courtesy of the transistor he keeps glued to his ear.

These early scenes are compelling enough, but where do you go from there? Well, straight to the big complication, we expect, to some melodramatic blowup borrowed from the likes of Of Mice and Men. But no. Instead, there are merely little complications -- mild fretting from the principal (Alfre Woodard) about Radio's unauthorized presence in the school; petty complaints from the town banker that his excitable antics (he's really out of his shell now) will pose a distraction to the team's winning ways.

Initially, this absence of melodrama seems a cause for celebration. As he proved in The Rookie, screenwriter Mike Rich has a nice way with warm-hearted yarns, never allowing the sentimental volume to get too loud or grating. And the principal performances here are perfectly in rhythm with the script's subdued tone. Harris's coach has none of the rah-rah blather of the stereotype. Rather, he's simply a decent fellow doing the right thing for a good reason -- yep, the right thing, The Right Stuff, this is just a grounded version of a character easily within his impressive range. So whenever a hunk of marshmallow dialogue floats in to choke him ("We're not the one's been teachin' Radio, Radio's been teachin' us"), Harris just sucks it up and drawls it out.

Gooding fares just as well. Even the best actors -- Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Sean Penn in I Am Sam -- tend to move mechanically through this sort of role. You can see the gears working and almost hear their plea for praise: "Hey, look at normal me playing abnormal so brilliantly." Although Gooding, using a set of misshapen teeth as his main prop, isn't entirely innocent of that sin, he's considerably less guilty than I'd feared. His take on Radio is necessarily limited by the two-dimensional nature of the part (deficient in smarts but otherwise a paragon of virtue); however, it does have a natural and uncontrived feel.

Problem is, we're still waiting for a third act. Avoiding the genre's hoariest clichés is well and fine, yet there has to be something more than admirable restraint to replace them with -- especially in a picture that sneaks up on the two-hour mark. Radio is a lot better than the Muzak it threatens to be, but, ultimately, not good enough to keep our itchy fingers off the dial.