The new football film Friday Night Lights bears the legend "based on a true story," but it's really based on the fundamental sports film narrative: the underdog story. Here, once more, is a little team that could-overcome the odds, an early-season injury to its star player, various troubles at home and, if you can believe it, the wrong color sneakers.

What's surprising-and often thrilling-about Friday Night Lights is how the film manages, for the most part, to make an old story feel new, full of fresh details and feeling.

Perhaps that's because before it was a movie, Friday Night Lights was an acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.G. Bissinger, who spent a year in Odessa, Texas, following the fortunes of the Permian Panthers, one of the most successful high school football teams in the country. Bissinger has provided producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and 8 Mile) and director Peter Berg with a wealth of rich reporting about what a winning team means to a small city that has only two things going for it, "football and oil, and there ain't no more oil." They wisely make the most of their source, adopting a quasi-documentary style for the film, which was shot in and around Odessa, including the team's fabled Ratliff Stadium, which rises like a 20,000-seat mirage from the desert flatlands of West Texas.

Shrewder still, the filmmakers cast Billy Bob Thornton, who's spent most of his career playing odd men out, as Permian's upright head coach, Gary Gaines. Thornton runs all the standard plays-football coach as both drill sergeant and father figure-with finesse, but he's especially good at showing the tensions and inevitable moral compromises that come with what he calls "the business of winning."

No matter where Coach Gaines goes-be it a dinner party, the local Wal-Mart or the supposed sanctuary of his office-people offer him pointers, not to mention the occasional veiled threat. Even driving alone in his car, he's assailed by talk radio and by callers who give ardent voice to every self-doubt running through his head. And while Gaines is portrayed as a man of honor, Thornton also allows us to glimpse the uneasy way his future rests on the backs and bad knees of a bunch of teenagers.

Those teenagers also feel the pressure to bring another state title back to Odessa-whether to appease an abusive parent or to please the college scouts who throng the sidelines. Indeed, the first real flashes of color in the film are the bright folders the scouts carry like gleaming first-class tickets out of Odessa. "We gotta lighten up," the team's captain, Brian Chavez (Jay Hernandez), tells the high-strung quarterback, Mike Winchell (Lucas Black). "We're only 17."

"Do you feel 17?" is Winchell's unsmiling reply.

Of course, in a film like this all roads lead to the big game, in this case the state championship against a largely black Dallas high school, whose players are cast as a gang of "big, fast and dirty" Goliaths against the Davids from Odessa, who are predominantly white. As he did in 8 Mile with white rapper Eminem, producer Grazer proves himself willing to go to dubious lengths to maintains his heroes' underdog status.

But this final game contains other, better surprises, and an ending that manages the difficult feat of being both uplifting and largely unromanticized. By season's end, the unsmiling quarterback is grinning from ear to ear. Because of everything he's accomplished? Because he may never have to pick up another football ever again? It's to Friday Night Lights' credit that both answers seem plausible.