The recluse

In "Reign Over Me, " Adam Sandler looks exactly like Bob Dylan in the singer's mid-'80s "Empire Burlesque " period. Same graying corona of hair and beard-stubbled jowls, same enigmatic smile. The difference is in the eyes. Dylan's have always been unreadable shards of flint, but Sandler's are great, bottomless puppy eyes of sadness that say "love me." Until they snap into focus and say "just kidding."

Which is the real Sandler? Both, probably. "Reign Over Me" is a therapy drama in the vein of "The Fisher King "; it's about male friendship and 9/11 and healing and closure, and it is, surprisingly, not as unbearable as that sounds. Nor is Sandler, who plays Charlie Fineman , a New York dentist who went off his trolley when his wife and daughters died in one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.

That was five years ago, and when his college roommate, Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle ), runs into him, Charlie is, for all intents and purposes, a ghost. He lives off insurance money and rides a motor-scooter through the streets of Manhattan, plays video games until all hours and obsessively remodels his kitchen. He denies he ever had a family or that he knew Alan at all.

In short, Charlie is Rain Man , and Sandler plays him as he has previous "serious" roles in "Punch-Drunk Love " and "Spanglish ": with a gentle stammer and an inability to look anybody in the eye. He keeps changing the subject, too, nattering about trivia and Chinese food. Really: Rain Man. Maybe Sandler thinks if he keeps plowing this narrow rut he'll turn up an Oscar someday.

The funny thing is that Charlie's still a fully realized creation and a terribly moving one: A man who has fled back to an idealized youth to avoid the pain of moving on. That puts him an interesting half-step away from Billy Madison , Happy Gilmore , and a lot of Sandler's own fans, but you don't think about that while the story's progressing.

Actually, you think about how much fun it is to watch Don Cheadle act. "Reign Over Me" turns out to be Alan's story more than Charlie's, which is fine, since Cheadle comes with the full skill set. Alan's a dentist, too, married with two daughters, a busy practice. A nice guy. Dying for lack of oxygen. He latches on to the idea of helping Charlie as a way to get off the leash of his controlling wife (Jada Pinkett Smith ) and get back to his own carefree college years.

The problem is that Charlie's not a college buddy anymore. He's a profoundly disturbed individual, and the very mention of his dead family sends him into furniture-breaking rages. His in-laws (played by Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon ) noodge him to show the proper respect to their daughter's memory but they also drop hints about having him committed. Alan decides to help, which in this sort of movie means he's really helping himself.

"Reign Over Me" -- the title comes from the 1973 Who song "Love, Reign O'er Me ," which Charlie uses to drown out the world on his headphones -- is written and directed by Mike Binder , who also plays Charlie's ferrety accountant. Binder has bounced around in television ("The Mind of the Married Man ") and movies ("The Upside of Anger ") and he loves the sound of guys hanging out doing nothing. The sweetest, sharpest scenes in the movie involve Alan, Charlie, snack food, and a wall-size TV playing the videogame "Shadow of the Colossus ."

The weirdest scenes involve women. "Reign Over Me" has issues with them a shrink could charge double for, and they're not the ones Binder thinks he's dealing with. Conveniently, there's a lady psychiatrist in the same office building as Alan, an angelic Dr. Fixit played by Liv Tyler whose postdoctoral assets are noted approvingly by both him and Charlie (they're a lot blunter than I am).

Pinkett Smith, meanwhile, chops endless vegetables and folds countless napkins; if her hair were scrunchied any tighter, her head would explode. Charlie's father-in-law's a mensch, his mother-in-law's a harpy. What Charlie remembers best about his wife is that "she never nagged me." And so on.

The strangest character in this locker room is Donna (Saffron Burrows ), one of the psychiatrist's patients who wanders down the hall, sits in Alan's dentist's chair, and offers to pleasure him. She's gorgeous in the bargain, and the movie is torn between making hubba-hubba noises, deriding her as a castrating nutcase, and taking her seriously. She's the least believable character I've seen on a movie screen in many a moon.

But Alan and his small discontents are believable, and the character of Charlie taps into a deeper anxiety. Not 9/11, although "Reign Over Me" uses that dreadful touchstone honorably enough. Many of us, though, may have a longtime friend or two who've lost their way -- who've been shipwrecked by life and now seem smudged, not all there. They remind us of what we got right and what we were terrified we'd get wrong.

Do you cross the street to avoid these people or do you mess up your orderly existence to help fix theirs? Binder reminds us the latter response is the only human one, and Cheadle makes that choice sane and warming. In its best moments, "Reign Over Me" quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie is a problem friend.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.