Julianne Moore should start picking out her Oscar dress now. The four-time Academy Award nominee is the star of the based-on-fact familial drama “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” and it’s a virtual lock she’s going to find herself sitting the audience for a fifth time. Moore is perfection incarnate, so startlingly phenomenal as the frazzled-yet-cheerful title character it’s impossible for me not to think she’s going to get noticed.

And kudos to her, because without the actress I have trouble believing this movie would register on anyone’s radar, let alone the Academy’s. Not that “Prize Winner” isn’t any good, just the opposite, I just don’t think anyone would care if she wasn’t in it. No, for all the film’s charms and pleasant disposition this drama can’t help but come across like a made-for-cable Lifetime channel movie of the week. As nice as I think it is, that feeling is an awful difficult one for me to shake.

Still, I feel a little like a picky fuddy-duddy for saying that. The story of Evelyn Ryan (Moore), this is about as inspiring and warm-hearted a melodrama as I person is likely to find. You see, Evelyn has a gift, a gift for winning jingle contests corporations found popular (and profitable) to help sell their products during the 1950’s and 60’s. Good thing, too, because thanks to her self-described, “knack for words,” she was able to keep her family of ten children afloat while her husband Kelly (Woody Harrelson) struggled to keep his job.

As the years go by, Kelly’s inability to fight alcoholism and the growing needs of their voluminous clan threatens to tear the Ryan’s and their marriage apart. Worse, it becomes apparent to all of them that Evelyn’s gift is making Mr. Ryan increasingly jealous, the fact she has become the breadwinner driving Kelly slowly mad. But, through it all, Evelyn never loses her focus, intent on making sure she does everything possible to make sure they all have a roof over their heads and food on the table. Most of all, she’s going to make sure they remain a family, that more important and dear to the homemaker than any successful jingle ever could.

Thankfully, the majority of this is nowhere near as glossy or syrupy as it sounds. Writer-director Jane Anderson (HBO’s “Normal”) adapts Terry “Tuff” Ryan’s memoir beautifully, keeping the film’s focus squarely upon Evelyn and her unwavering drive to keep her family together. She uses the era’s artifices wonderfully, never hitting viewers over the head with the sad state of women’s rights (and opportunities) during the era and instead subtly making audience’s aware that this is a world decidedly different than their own.

Anderson gets it right so much of the way through, when she does get it wrong it’s almost a shock. There is an omnipresent forced perkiness to much of it that’s slightly overbearing. Also, a few of the scenes play like episodes of “Leave it to Beaver,” while some sequences detailing Evelyn’s creative process go far too over the top taking me out of the movie completely. I also thought her friendship with a group of contesters, nicknamed the Affadaisies, never really takes off. Laura Dern’s (as head Affadaisy Dortha Shaefer) performance is forced and not anywhere near as charming as it should be and the picture is far too frantic and colorfully juvenile during many of her scenes.

Luckily much of the rest is pretty much spot-on. Anderson recreates the era spectacularly, reimagining the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in (at least I think so- I wasn’t exactly around) in exquisite detail. Every time someone says “swell” instead of “cool,” each vintage car that drives passed the screen, every commercial jingle played, makes it hard to forget “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio” is a new movie and not an old Douglas Sirk melodrama made just after “Written on the Wind.” (Of course, had Sirk made this it would have starred Rock Hudson and Deborah Kerr. It also would have been even better.)

At its heart, though, is the stunning give-and-take between Moore and Harrelson. Much like the chemistry she shared with Dennis Quaid with the similarly old-fashioned “Far From Heaven,” Moore gets along splendidly with her costar, so well you almost believe they’re actually a couple. It is a multifaceted, complex relationship full of twists and turns only two individuals deeply in love would take the time and energy to navigate. They are the soul of Anderson’s movie, the driving force that glues all the oblong pieces together with authoritative grace.

By the time the real-life Ryan children take the stage the film’s most heartwarming effects have already been felt. Tears fall generously, honestly earned emotion coming from a place not laced (at least too much) with cliché. Even with my reservations (other than two moments, one between mother and daughter on the side of the road and the other covered in Jell-O, the children are complete non-entities), on the whole there is very little to be disappointed in. Evelyn Ryan probably would have said it in rhyme, and I’m more than happy to leave that skill to her, but I’ll just take the easy way out and call her cinematic biography a, well, winner.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)