(Enlarge) Jae Head is S. J. Tuohy, Quinton Aaron is Michael Oher and Sandra Bullock is Leigh Anne Tuohy in Alcon Entertainment’s “The Blind Side.”

The inspirational biography of Baltimore Ravens' player Michael Oher makes the movie based on his life, "The Blind Side," of sporting interest to local moviegoers.

Although it's totally predictable as Hollywood biopics go, its big heart can't be denied. This football movie practically insists that you cheer, so you might as well.

It would be difficult not to applaud an uplifting story about a young black man who is abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, lives on the street, walks down his high school hallways as a near-silent gentle giant, emotionally opens up when a white family becomes his legal guardian, and goes on to success in high school football and beyond.

The filmmaking is formulaic, but it gets the job done. Based on Michael Lewis' book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game," director-screenwriter John Lee Hancock's adaptation dutifully moves in a scene-by-scene way through Oher's life story.

The story's real-life basis obviously gives the movie dramatic heft, and the earnest acting also makes it worthwhile to stick with a story that heads exactly where you expect it to.

What really holds everything together here is Quinton Aaron's completely persuasive performance as Oher. The character is given so few lines of dialogue that the challenge for the actor is to quietly let events register on his impassive face. Although it's not a subtle movie, Aaron brings subtle touches to otherwise paint-by-number scenes.

The same unfortunately can't be said for Sandra Bullock's starring performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wealthy Memphis woman who takes a strong personal interest in this homeless student. Leigh Anne and her businessman husband, Sean (Tim McGraw), live with their two young children (Lilly Collins and Jae Head) in a mansion that is a world away from Michael Oher's ghetto environment on the other side of town.

Oher attends the same school as the Tuohy children. That makes Leigh Anne intrigued when she realizes he's wandering the streets on a cold night. It's easy to understand why she would invite him over to their palace, er, house.

Spending the night there quickly gives way to a live-in arrangement and eventual adoption. It's heartwarming to follow this domestic evolution as it plays across Oher's face, because he is so unaccustomed to kindness.

When Leigh Anne makes him feel at home and even arranges for a tutor, Miss Sue (Kathy Bates), to help him improve his failing grades, it's clear that this fashionably attired supermom possesses humanistic substance beneath her form-fitting designer duds.

Her society friends aren't sure what to make of what they assume is some sort of charitable project on Leigh Anne's part. When she gets together with these friends in an effectively cliched ladies-who-lunch scene at a swank restaurant, issues of race and class are on the menu.

Leigh Anne achieves heroic status, but the movie overplays its hand. An actress not generally known for restraint, Sandra Bullock tackles this role with such gusto that perhaps the NFL should have drafted her instead of Michael Oher.

Although it's the kind of blustery movie star performance that's warranted under these inspirational circumstances, it's often at odds with Quinton Aaron's beautifully understated performance as Oher. One could argue that this surrogate mom and her needy son are such different character types that these two performances have reason to be just as different, but the jarring effect is of Bullock's Hollywood showboating colliding with Aaron's subdued naturalism.

However well-intentioned its motives, the movie often plays with a dramatically stacked deck. The worst offender is a scene in which the stylishly dressed Leigh Anne drives her expensive car into the very rough neighborhood where Michael Oher grew up. Leigh Anne goes there alone in order to warn several thugs to leave him alone. The bad guys glare at her, but they back down. This movie's real message is that you don't mess with Sandra Bullock. Grade: B-

"The Blind Side" (PG-13) opens Friday, Nov. 20 at area theaters.

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