Is The Longest Ride based on a true story?

On the Box Office Mojo website, “The Longest Ride” is described in three words: “Brand: Nicholas Sparks.” That may be all you need to know. The film, directed by George Tillman Jr. (“Soul Food,” “The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete”), is the latest screen adaptation of work by an author whose stamp is unmistakable. To those familiar with his novels — and, more relevant to our purposes here, with the seacoast-and-sunlight, white-people-kissing-in-the-rain movies they have inspired — Mr. Sparks’s name evokes a genre, an aesthetic, a swoony, saccharine, weirdly compelling gestalt.

A Nicholas Sparks movie is a romantic melodrama in which the road to enduring love is paved with complications, some preposterous, some life-threatening. The setting is usually North Carolina (unless tax incentives in other states inspire a change). In addition to coastal sunsets and kisses in the rain, you can expect most of the following things: an atmosphere of implicitly but not doctrinally Christian spirituality; a young couple from two different worlds (though both are white); at least one medical crisis; a death; a handful of bad characters whose badness is not quite visible to the main couple until it’s too late. These can be rival suitors, faithless friends, snooty relatives or just plain meanies. Their job is to add drama, and to collaborate with the unseen hand of fate to keep the plot in frantic motion.

“The Longest Ride” is a bit of an anomaly in that it is almost entirely free of villains, apart from a fearsome bull named Rango. It’s nothing personal, of course. At the start of the movie, Rango throws a young rider named Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood), causing serious (though not looks-compromising) injury and derailing Luke’s ambitions to become the top bull rider on the rodeo circuit. It’s important to note here that Luke is motivated less by the drive for glory or sponsorship lucre than by the need to keep his family ranch going after the death of his father. Speaking of fathers, Mr. Eastwood’s resemblance to the younger, “Rawhide”-era incarnation of his own dad is downright uncanny: the line of the jaw, the hint of a smile, the as yet squintless blue eyes.

At a competition a year after the Rango incident, those peepers connect with a pair of baby blues belonging to Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson), an art history major at Wake Forest University who has tagged along with some of her sorority sisters hoping to see “the hottest guys.” Not that Sophia is that kind of girl, any more than Luke is the kind of fellow who would be led astray by the rodeo groupies who fill the stands. He’s an old-fashioned guy, the kind who insists on buying the drinks and making the first phone call and who shows up for his first date with flowers and a plan for a moonlight lakeside barbecue picnic.

Image

But as I said: different worlds. Sophia, the daughter of Polish immigrants who grew up in New Jersey — her background may be the single least believable thing in the whole movie, which is saying a lot — has an internship lined up at a Manhattan art gallery. Luke is committed to staying on Rango’s back for eight seconds even if it kills him. (Which it might!) What kind of future could they have together?

Of course you and I know the answer perfectly well — it involves kissing under a spray of water — though the events that reveal it are beyond ordinary powers of prediction. But the obstacles along the way seem trivial enough to make the story of their relationship fairly tedious, despite the charm and sincerity of the actors. Luckily, they meet Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), a widower whose chronicle of monogamous bliss is the mirror and prophecy of their own. As Ira recovers from a car accident, he reads from a collection of letters recounting his courtship and marriage. It’s not quite clear why he wrote so many letters to a woman he saw every day — letters that sometimes seem to narrate what they did together just a few hours before the time of composition — but it’s sweet that he saved them.

My memory is not always as keen as it should be, but in my long and rich acquaintance with the Nicholas Sparks cinematic brand I don’t think I have ever heard one character wish another “Good Shabbos.” Ira and his bride, Ruth — played in flashbacks by Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin, grandchildren of cinema royalty — are both Jewish, he the son of a small-town tailor in North Carolina, she a cultured and artistic refugee from Vienna. Different worlds. They meet in 1940. He goes to war and returns home with an inconvenient wound. Unable to have children, Ira and Ruth collect art, traveling to nearby Black Mountain College to buy paintings by real-life artists.

The mid-20th-century avant-garde is as unexpected a presence in this kind of movie as the Hebrew prayer book, and these exotic elements — along with a remarkably pedigreed cast — give “The Longest Ride” the dollop of specialness that is a brand requirement. “The Last Song” had Miley Cyrus and baby sea turtles. “Nights in Rodanthe” had the word Rodanthe. “Dear John” and “The Lucky One” had the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “The Notebook” had Gena Rowlands and the wettest kiss ever. “A Walk to Remember” had ... honestly I forget. Someone put together a listicle! That’s the kind of criticism this brand was made for.

“The Longest Ride” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Sex: hot, monogamous and discreetly edited.