On the dry and dusty road The nights we spent apart alone I need to get back home To cool cool rain I can’t sleep and I lay and I think The night is hot and black as ink Woo Oh God I need a drink Of cool cool rain Love Reign o’er me Rain over me Over me Over me

The Who could have easily written those words for Adam Sandler’s Charlie Fineman in the new movie Reign Over Me (which makes ample use of the Quadrophenia song), in theaters this weekend. The story of a man who loses his three young daughters and wife during the 9/11 attacks on the United States is yes, a movie that is decidedly post-9/11 (not only chronologically). But it’s also a movie about love indeed reigning over one everyguy American whose life is torn apart by tragedy. If Reign Over Me had nothing to do with the war on terror, it would still be a beautiful, well-done, and masculine ode to the redemptive grace that comes with true friendship, which saves both Sandler’s and co-star Don Cheadle’s characters in very different ways.

Charlie Fineman (and he is one) is a role — maybe the role — Sandler was born to play. Fineman — who is one — is an emotionally wrenching character — not the typical for the guy who played Billy Madison, but also not entirely unusual. Of course, we all know Sandler well for playing the decent but not-so-bright dudes who make generous use of sixth-grade-boy humor. But in recent years (Spanglish…) we’ve watched Sandler become a man — a (semi/sometimes) responsible husband and loving father — on the silver screen. Even with his Bob Dylan look in Reign Over Me there’s something of the familiar, comfortable Sandler character there; you can almost imagine — as he passes that Waverly Place McDonald’s where he ran into a homeless Steve Buscemi in 1999 and yet again his family starts to heal in an emotional courtroom scene deep into the movie — you can almost naturally imagine Charlie Fineman as Big Daddy’s Sonny Koufax grown up, still a New Yorker, now faced with the war on terror hitting all too close to home. He’s still making the occasional off-color joke, but how can he not?, he’s the Sandman.

Unlike some of his other “adult” roles (a.k.a. not Waterboy), there is no unevenness or awkward transitions (Click) in Reign Over Me. And Cheadle serves up just as much natural comic relief as Sandler does as his college roommate, now a well-off and happily (but selfishly) married Park Avenue dentist. The two are reunited when they run into one another on the streets of Manhattan four years after 9/11.

Reign Over Me is a wartime movie and an important contribution to Hollywood’s treatment of the war. Politics don’t really find a place in the movie — save for a few flashes of news coverage — terror alerts in New York, bags being checked in the subway, footage of Iraqis protesting. But when he finally opens up about things he doesn’t want to remember, Fineman painfully recalls the morning of 9/11. He was going to meet his wife, Doreen, and his daughters Gina, Jenny, and Julie in Los Angeles, they were leaving from Boston after a visit with relatives.

You can imagine how the story goes from here — some 3,000 real-life American families still have to live through the life-destroying memories; Charlie recounts the chaos of the reporting. “The plane’s from Boston,” one guy said, Fineman recalls. He had been dropped off at LaGuardia, already knowing from his taxi’s radio that he would not be going anyway. There were two planes, another says. Fineman remembers watching on TV. Unbearably he says, as if living through it all again, watching that second plane hit the World Trade Center: “I saw it and I felt it at the same time. I thought about Gina’s birthmark and I felt them burning.”

It may be my northeastern conceit, but there’s something especially New York about Reign Over Me. Perhaps because I knew it was a “9/11 movie” of sorts, I was looking for it, but as the movie began it had the feel of 9/11 and 9/12 to me. Where even in midtown where I was there was zero traffic as we all smelled that awful barbecue smell and tried to comfort one another, or at least acknowledge our mutual shock and anger. As the lost 9/11 widower Charlie Fineman wandered the streets of Manhattan on his scooter at all kinds of rare hours, the barren streets were eerily familiar if you were in New York City those days.

And while Fineman would be a fine man and Cheadle’s Alan Johnson would be a decent friend in any scenario, the setting and context is an important one. This is a movie about our people, what was done to our people by “those monsters who flew over here from across the world,” as Fineman’s mother-in-law (Melinda Dillon) puts it.

In remarks at the world premiere of Reign Over Me on Wednesday night at New York University (Sandler’s alma mater), not so far from where nonfictional characters were murdered almost six years ago, director Mike Binder told those in attendance that he wanted to do justice to the suffering of some of our fellow Americans, “to be reverent and respectful.” With a healthy dose of the humor that’s expected from anything Sandler is anywhere near (Cheadle’s pretty funny himself, along with a strong supporting cast), Reign Over Me does that. And reminds us the contribution culture can make to too-real things.