"Grace Is Gone" takes the bluster, the billions of dollars and the bitter debate over the war in Iraq and reduces it to a simple equation: A family of four.

A mother serving overseas with the U.S. Army, a father working back home in Minnesota and looking after their daughters, and the girls, ages 12 and 8.

Grace's voice is still on the answering machine, where she leaves cheery messages -- "I love you and I miss you. Write me." -- while her husband, Stan (John Cusack), is at the big-box home store where he's a manager, and their children are at school.

At almost 13, Heidi (Shelan O'Keefe) is a serious, responsible girl whose effort to watch a TV news report about a Baghdad bombing is shut down by her dad. Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) has the exuberance and innocence of a typical 8-year-old but with a watch that beeps at the same time each day as her mother's, a reminder to think of the other.

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'Grace Is Gone'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: John Cusack.
• Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, brief strong language and teen smoking.
• Web site: 'Grace Is Gone'

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Shortly after the movie opens, Stan opens his front door to find a sight that leaves him dazed: Two men in uniform who are there to tell him Grace has died. The movie tracks what happens as Stan tries to figure out how to tell his daughters the news.

"Grace Is Gone," directed and written by James C. Strouse, meanders as much as its characters, who embark on a road trip but finds its heart in Cusack and his young co-stars.

This is not the Cusack of "1408," "The Ice Harvest" or even last year's "Martian Child," in which he played a tender father. Stan is an average guy with nondescript clothes and haircut, outdated eyeglasses and a belief system that is more sincere than eloquent.

Although he surrenders to tears, Stan mainly has to soldier on, and Cusack conveys the weariness, the confusion, the paralysis over what to do. Young O'Keefe makes Heidi a complex mix of teen in years if not age, substitute mother and designated worrier while Gracie's Dawn is a girl whose joy or sorrow lies just beneath her skin.

The drama benefits enormously from Clint Eastwood's score, which is spare and elegant and speaks for the characters in a pivotal, moving scene. It lends a richness to a movie that wears its low budget on its sleeve.

This family lives in a world often ignored by Hollywood or lost in the sound-bite battle over the war. The magnetic yellow ribbon on the back of their car is more than a forgotten symbol; it's a family badge of courage and sacrifice.

Opens Friday at the Regent Square Theater, also holding over the Oscar shorts.