In many respects, Huck is a master of his craft. He reads people better than anyone, able to assess an opponent’s strengths and weakness so quickly he should be the best straight-up Texas Hold’em player bar none. The problem is he tends to blast his way through games, sometimes getting so emotionally riled up, especially if L.C. is at the table, he can’t realize when the moment for picking up his winnings and leaving the table has more than come and gone.

Enter Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore), a semi-talented singer from Bakersfield with aspirations of becoming a professional chanteuse. She notices Huck’s propensity to read every situation and avoid emotional entanglements immediately. But something else strikes her about the man, too, and against her better judgment, not to mention the advice of her sister Suzanne (Debra Messing), suddenly this girl from nowhere is involved in a romance neither person can bet on where it is headed next.

Director and co-writer Curtis Hanson’s (Wonder Boys, L.A. Confidential) long-delayed romantic drama set in the world of professional high-stakes poker Lucky You is an absolutely absorbing and frustratingly disappointing enigma. On the one hand, I do not think I have ever seen a Vegas-set film that feels as authentic and as lived-in as this one. On the other, so much of it is so inert and strangely boring watching the whole thing in one sitting is, at times, nothing more than a two-hour chore.

Add these two things together and you have a seriously mixed bag. Worse, while the Cheever family melodrama is as poignant and as stirring as I could have hoped it to be, the love story between Huck and Billie is shamefully weak. The film forced me to wring my hands in frustration, moments of pure cinematic pleasure contrasted with sequences so unbearable I almost don’t know what to say.

What I will say is that, even with all the flaws and the missteps, I respect Lucky You for the nice try it is. Hanson and fellow screenwriter Eric Roth (The Insider) have crafted a picture full of real people going through real emotional issues never looking down upon either them or the drama they are dealing with. It also paints a picture of Las Vegas the likes of which I don’t ever recall seeing, Sin City a quixotic playground grinding up its inhabitants with devilish relish only to spit them back out into the street with malevolent disdain.

Bana is terrific, easily delivering his best performance since Black Hawk Down. Duvall is even better. The two share a scene in a small diner as pure and as perfect as any moment this year, the veteran Oscar-winner creating a character full of so many little nuances I started to feel like I knew L.C. my whole life. He’s magnificent, Duvall delivering easily what I think is one of 2007’s best performances, the only true shame being nobody is going to remember it longer than a couple of weeks as this picture rushes in and out of multiplexes like a vanishing whisper.

Too bad, really, because as noble failures go this one is right at the top of the list. Hanson goes out of his way to invest things with ultra realistic verisimilitude, the poker scenes so genuine people who play the game on a regular basis are probably going to fall in love right from the very fist frame. But there comes a point where realism and entertainment sadly diverge, and about the seventeenth time the characters sat down at a card table I was about ready to throw my own chips in and leave the theater.

That’s actually rather harsh. At no time did I want to leave, especially after a knockout opening scene between Bana and Little Children star Phyllis Somerville wet my appetite for something extraordinary. Unfortunately, Lucky You is really quite ordinary as far as disappointments go, and while I applaud the effort a part of me can’t help but think Hanson’s latest is still nothing more than a fascinating bust.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)