Cusack a marvel in powerful 'Grace'

• If veteran actors ever qualify for one of those "breakthrough performance" awards given by various critics organizations, John Cusack would easily win one for his role as a father and husband in James C. Strouse's quietly evocative domestic drama "Grace is Gone."

With his bad haircut, clunky horn rims, frumpy clothes and slouchy posture, Cusack's Stanley Phillips hardly resembles the Evanston-born actor known for his bold, wise-cracking, maverick persona.

Cusack's Stanley is a cog who works at a Midwest big-box store as a personality-challenged member of middle management. His well-ordered, uneventful world gets rocked by the news that his soldier wife, Grace, has been killed in Iraq.

Now, the emotionally reserved, highly inarticulate father faces the greatest unpleasant task of his adult life: telling his daughters, 12-year-old Heidi (Chicago's Shelan O'Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (River Grove's Gracie Bednarczyk), that Grace is gone.

Although this has been labeled an anti-war movie because of its Iraq references, "Grace is Gone" is mostly a heartbreaking study of how a father deals with his own loss, all the while fearing the pain he must eventually inflict on his children.

There's not a lot of complicated camera work or stylish excess going on in this modest movie, and that's OK. Strouse, a screenwriter making a serviceable directorial debut, has a strong story, lean script and three superb actors to keep us actively engaged in Stanley's struggle to deal with reality.

At first, Stanley does everything he can to postpone the inevitable. He loads the kids into the car and heads off to a favorite vacation spot, Enchanted Gardens down in Florida.

Younger Dawn thrills at the family adventure. But Heidi is just old enough to read between Dad's unspoken lines, and restrains herself from challenging Dad's behavior.

O'Keefe and Bednarczyk are naturals in front of the lens. But this movie belongs to Cusack, who traces Stanley's journey from denial to acceptance with effortless transparency, and ends at a stylized moment of truth that might leave some viewers feeling cheated, but others pleasantly exhausted.

"Grace is Gone" opens today at Webster Place in Chicago. Rated PG-13 (language, teen smoking). 85 minutes. ...

• In "Starting Out in the Evening," Frank Langella turns in a career-capper of a performance during a smart, knowing story of three people grappling to connect with each other before time runs out.

Langella, who turns 70 on Jan. 1, plays Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist whose previous books have long been out of print, and his latest has been a work in progress for the past decade, ever since his wife died and he suffered a near-fatal heart attack.

Into his life walks a young, attractive grad student named Heather Wolfe (a perky Lauren Ambrose). Her genuine love of Schiller's prose eventually grinds down the author's resistance to her probing questions and her persistent offers to help him get that last book finished.

The clock doesn't favor Schiller, and Wolfe knows it. She practically pushes herself into Schiller's life and makes the novelist her graduate project. Chicago's own Lili Taylor gives a realistic, rusty edge to Schiller's estranged daughter Ariel, whose unwillingness to marry and raise grandkids continues to be a contentious issue with Dad.

"Starting Out, " based on the book by Brian Morton, is the second feature from director Andrew Wagner, who gave us the indie favorite "The Talent Given Us." He lets his cast carry the narrative momentum, and Langella, incapable of rendering a dull moment on screen, displays a mature, raw power impossible to master by anything less than a lifetime of experience on stage and set.

"Starting Out in the Evening" opens today at the Music Box in Chicago and Renaissance Place in Highland Park. (PG-13) sexual situations, language. 110 minutes. ...

• Marc Forster's epic drama "The Kite Runner" got its biggest PR push when Paramount Classics executives, worried about retribution against a young Afghan actor for participating in a dramatized child rape, pushed the opening date back to allow the lad to finish school.

The rape scene, framed within the modest boundaries of a PG-13 rating, sets the story, based on the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, into motion. In 1978, 12-year-old Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) intends to win a kite contest (and recognition from his stern, successful father) in the Afghan capital Kabul with his friend and servant, Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada).

Jealous juvenile thugs in the neighborhood confront the loyal Hassan, who will not give up his friend's beautiful kite, even under threat of violence. He is raped on the spot while the unseen, cowardly Amir does nothing to stop the crime.

Guilt eats away at Amir. Even 22 years later, shame forces the adult Amir (played by charismatic "United 93" star Khalid Abdalla) to return home and make amends. But Kabul has fallen under the ruinous, oppressive control of the Taliban, who have turned the thriving capital into a wasteland of decay and fear.

Forster, who has enjoyed directorial success with "Finding Neverland" and "Monster's Ball" (and abject failure with "Stay"), prods David Benioff's adapted screenplay along at a snappy pace. Robert Schaefer puts his wide-screen cinematography to good use, chronicling the decline of Kabul over the years.

Yet, the movie's ending sequence, designed to prove to Amir that there's a way "to be good again," feels contrived and a bit underwhelming in its resolution.

"The Kite Runner" is reportedly the first movie to be photographed in China (on the western border near Afghanistan), even though the story's set in Kabul.

The movie opens today at Renaissance Place in Highland Park, the Century 12 in Evanston and the River East 21 in Chicago. Rated PG-13 (child rape, violence, language). 120 minutes. ...