The press has fallen in love with The Hurt Locker. For those of us who came of age during the combat-movie drought that wars like Iraq tend to engender—and who are typically disinclined to browse that genre at Blockbuster, besides—The Hurt Locker is like a first kiss. But I hesitate to stretch the metaphor, a.) As to not detract from the seriousness that is the movie’s desert, and b.) Because it is not quite so good as to extend to the proverbial loss of my virginity.

There’s a sense of inevitability that permeates The Hurt Locker, and though it affects us on a deeper level than most procedurals do by virtue of both skill and discretion, the film stays true to that limited form. I don’t wish to be unfair; the way the filmmakers follow the procedural lockstep is integral to their conception, and part of the movie’s power stems from the singular, sensuous way they underplay the suspense scenes—poeticizing the horrors that are, for these characters, routine. The flesh is thick, and there’s a heart beating beneath it, but we can still detect that skeleton with clichés in its marrow: the trailer-park individualist who gets the job done but puts others at risk in the process; the by-the-book black soldier whose respect the lone wolf earns; and the younger, more impressionable lad who comes to idolize the loner. There’s familiarity in all this, as well as in the lone wolf’s relationship with a young local boy (Christopher Sayegh)—an Iraqi Shia LaBoeuf who, in a nice touch, endears himself to Americans by way of curse words. (It sounds as if Lil Wayne was his English teacher.)

But the director, Kathryn Bigelow, is a pro in both the banal sense and the positive one; she knows the ropes, but knows how to tug them, too. Her focus is narrow and her methods are austere, but her targets are well embodied, and pregnant with echoes of their grander context. It’s as if she made a war film in the style of The Wrestler. She stages combat effectively, appositely—the complexity of her images is almost subliminal. Rich in its invocation of atmosphere, The Hurt Locker coats the sun-baked sands of arid Iraq with a cool iridescent gel. It’s not the kind of star-glamour antifreeze required for a bland, exploitive movie like The Kingdom (2007)—a lemon; it’s more like the psychological analgesics that professional soldiers mask their anxieties with. We aren’t given babes in the woods like Charlie Sheen in Platoon; unformed baby-men whose innocence is despoiled by war are a dramatic shortcut, as easy to sympathize with as puppies under Jack the Ripper’s knife. Bigelow lets us under her guarded soldiers’ skins with a vision that’s neither tawdry nor ironic.

These troopers constitute a bomb squad in its final weeks of deployment in Baghdad: cocksure SSgt. James (Jeremy Renner), prim Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and sensitive Sgt. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). James is something of a legend for having disarmed 800-something I.E.D.s in his day, and approaches each new one with an aloofness that drives his teammates batty. This is pure procedural—vindicating the competent badass (and we’re cued in immediately that he’s a badass because he smokes cigarettes) who doesn’t follow the rules but gets the job done is old-bag Hollywood heroism. But the more we see James in action, the more his strut seems abreast of a fresher truth; back on the home front, he’s either a father or some woman’s baby-daddy—his ex-wife still lives with him, so he’s not sure. He’s graceful under pressure, and in the heat of combat, he’s coolly maternal to his men; yet, as Eldridge tells him, he’s one hell of a leader, but lackluster as a people person. He needs the specter of death barking up his leg like a rabid dog; without it, he can’t be all that he can be. His ravenous addiction to war is the tragedy of war.

One can imagine that Mark Boal’s script is delicately sparse: an outline using Post-It-note character summaries for guidance. I don’t mean this derogatorily. The characters don’t fully explain themselves or their biographies in much detail, but that doesn’t make them seem incomplete or phony or untrue to the types of people they represent; it’s a gracious form of ambiguity on Boal’s part—gracious to us and the actors. Renner, of course, is the star—but, unlike Jamie Foxx in The Kingdom, Renner makes his baditude seem mildewy, a defense against his battered sensitivity, which seems native to that plucky, plaintive face. I remember that face from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, though he was subordinated there by Brad Pitt, Sam Rockwell, and Casey Affleck; but the chilly serial killer he played in Dahmer, which I once caught as a midnight snack on IFC, seems more closely related to his bomb tech here. Renner’s instinct leads him to introversion, which is perfect for SSgt. James; like Boal’s script, James’s character needs not be altogether there on the screen, but Renner isn’t like Christian Bale’s pilot in Rescue Dawn, who really wasn’t there at all. Renner’s self-seclusion isn’t appropriate for most leading-man parts I can think of, but he sends the stock role that James resembles into a tailspin. Mackie and Geraghty haven’t that mobility to work with in their characters, but perform very well; Mackie pulls off his Oscar-baiting breakdown (and I hope they take the bait), and Geraghty is meek without ever being weak—or annoying. In fact, he’s rather touching.

In a way, Bigelow and her team are more courageous than those who wear blinders in decrying the War in Iraq exclusively, sound as their premises might be. The makers of The Hurt Locker challenge the notion of war itself—be it in the form of bombs over Baghdad or muskets in Manassas (bayonets through Bull Run, if yer a Yank)—because of the toll it can take on soldiers. Lest one objects to pure pacifism, rest assured that the picture refuses to impose any doctrines on its audience or dog it with any dogma. A fundamental ambiguity exists. Like any hardcore addict whose value system is overridden by preternatural longings, James is weakened as a human being. His longing for adrenaline (and maybe something else) puts his life and those of others at risk even when in the service of saving lives; it’s cost one innocent his legs and one son his father—what next? In practice, the military needs techs like James, but, in theory, should it? Without answering directly, the film keeps you haunted by the question because of its adroit action sequences; Bigelow stimulates the lesser angels of our nature aesthetically rather than frivolously. (The relationship between the violence in The Hurt Locker and that in Inglourious Basterds is that of erotic poetry and exotic porn—porn directed by a self-aggrandizing poet manqué.)

The Hurt Locker merely demonstrates that the surest way for a film to be anti-violence is for it to present dynamic human figures on both sides of a conflict that one can relate to or care for to that minimal degree that one is pained to see them harmed. (One might protest that the Iraqi insurgents seem like boogeymen scheming at a distance, but are the Americans’ overarching objectives made any clearer?) What makes The Hurt Locker unique is that it chronicles its hero’s transformation into a masochist. (That arc occurs in The Deer Hunter, too, but in a more sensational, less plausible way.) We are made to understand his suffering and more, and because of that, the film encroaches the domain of art. The sort of of complex feelings that the movie inspires are lessons that will be relevant long after the sands have settled in Iraq.

One final thought. It is not only as a cinephile, but as one who—perhaps with undue naïveté—assigns more credit to the good taste of the mass audience than the conglomerates do, that it behooves me that a procedural combat picture made with intelligence, vision and broad appeal (broader than Apocalypse Now if narrower than Three Kings) should deserve to play on a fraction of the screens that a blockbuster like G.I. Joe does. It’s David and Goliath to a literal extreme. I haven’t seen G.I. Joe, and may be mistaken in my prejudice, but my educated guess is that it’s a big, cretinous slugger written as much by focus groups and advertisers (and military lobbyists) as screenwriters. When a script is scrawled on sheets of thousand-dollar bills, those involved in its production need assurances that their venture can pay for itself—not to mention the upkeep of the producers’ six swimming pools.

On the weekend of August 30th, The Hurt Locker played on 306 screens, as opposed to G.I. Joe’s 3,467. Despite the 10-nominee dilution, The Hurt Locker may have enough buzz to fan out come Oscar time, but is it really fair that a movie should play on one-tenth of the screens another does just because it cost less than one-tenth of the other to make? Sure, The Hurt Locker isn’t based on toys that sold jingoism and made dapper dates for Barbie dolls, but is it fiscal conservatism to slap in the face the fiscally conservative? I’m too skeptical to believe that talent has any bearing on such judgments. The state of capitalism has gotten dreary in recent months, but you needn’t be a comrade to know that “liberal” Hollywood’s more conservative than ever.