'Love Song' of books and booze

In "A Love Song for Bobby Long," Scarlett Johansson plays Purslane Hominy Will, a high school dropout who returns to New Orleans after her musician mother's death to find a pair of highly literate alcoholics living in the house she thought she'd inherited. Eventually, it's revealed that Bobby Long (John Travolta), the elder and drunker of the two, was once a popular English professor at a big Southern university (either Duke or Auburn, if his sweatshirts are anything to go by) and that Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), his younger, marginally more sober sidekick, formerly his star pupil, is now his great white hope. (They have none, in other words.)

But their illustrious past is nowhere in evidence when Pursy, a tough-girl waitress fond of toggling between cooking and surgery shows while wallowing in piles of junk food, shows up on their doorstep after the funeral. Shuffling around the house in a bathrobe, Bobby mainlines vodka and generic cigarettes, alternately trying to seduce and evict his new housemate, to whom the deceased has, in fact, left the entire property. (And not, as Bobby maintains, just one-third of it.)

Lawson is his reluctant partner in crime: Clearly, the two are bound by more than just their mentor-student relationship, though it's unclear for a long time what that is. They waste away their days playing "name that quote" and dreaming about the Parisian future that awaits them when Lawson finally publishes his book. Director Shainee Gabel has a light enough touch as to ensure that we're never quite certain if they take themselves -- or their Great American novelist circa 1920 fantasies -- entirely seriously, but Bobby and Lawson might as well be a pair of modern-day male Bovaries: as wrecked by books as they are by booze.

Set in New Orleans and based on a soon-to-be published manuscript, "Off Magazine Street," by Ronald Everett Capps, Gabel's feature debut is, deep-down, a redemptive makeover story drenched in alcohol, Southern literature and the damp romanticism of the bohemian lush life in New Orleans. A lovely noble rot pervades the film in much the same way that it does the city, a longtime repository of lost-cause romanticism. If there's something a little bit moldy about the setup (drunken literary types, hope on the doorstep, healing from beyond the grave), the movie is no less charming or involving for it, and it's no less pleasant to succumb to its wayward allure and wastrel lyricism.