'Grace is Gone'

As Stanley Phillips, a big box-store manager and father of two, John Cusack looks like the high-school heartthrob you couldn't recognize at the 25th reunion: all bulked up and shielded by a pair of wire-framed aviator glasses that say, "Open for business only."

When he gets the news that his military wife has been killed in Iraq, Stanley shifts into serious avoidance mode. Too crushed and clueless to tell his girls, he packs them into the car and heads south for a theme-park excursion to Florida. Along the way, they indulge in strip-mall shopping and motor inns with swimming pools, detouring to see Stanley's lefty, unemployed brother John (Allesandro Nivola), who, at 32, is still sponging off his mother.

Written and directed with a heavy heart by James C. Strouse ("Lonesome Jim"), "Grace Is Gone" works stealthily to be the bonding family drama for all sides of the Iraq war argument, although it does not go unnoticed that the primary peacenik, John, is a whining layabout. Strouse writes astute, quietly funny dialogue, but a peculiar veneer of deja vu hangs over this last-big-splurge road picture: It feels like "The Last Detail" for the "High School Musical" set.

Cusack has never been better, however; he disappears into his chaacter's repressed skin so utterly, we can barely recognize in him the perky teen heartthrob of "Say Anything." As Stanley's bewildered older daughter, Heidi, Shelan O'Keefe is a pensive charmer.

Clint Eastwood wrote the generically plaintive piano score and end title tune (with Carole Bayer Sager), which suggests every best song nominee from the '80s thrown into a blender.

GRACE IS GONE (PG-13). John Cusack gives an impressively inhabited performance as a buttoned-down store manager who takes his two daughters on an impromptu vacation rather than confront the news of their military mom's recent death in Iraq. Despite its of-the-moment context, the dramatic territory feels as familiar and traversed as the highways that point this family to Florida. 1:25 (thematic material, brief strong language, teen smoking). At Lincoln Square and Landmark Sunshine, Manhattan.