True-life ‘Only the Brave’ better when it focuses on firefighters’ lives, not their deaths

The spirit of the Granite Mountain Hotshots — the Arizona crew who in 2013 were caught in the deadliest incident for U.S. firefighters since the 9/11 attacks — lives on in “Only the Brave,” a drama that captures the group’s camaraderie, self-sacrifice and unspoken heroism.

Because the movie is based on true events, complaining about spoilers is rather useless. It’s also, for most of the movie, beside the point, because director Joseph Kosinski focuses more on the lives the men of the Granite Mountain crew lived than on the way 19 of them died.

The team, the movie tells us, was a tight-knit group of men fighting fires for the city of Prescott, Ariz. Their tough-as-nails leader, Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin), trains his team hard, preparing them to battle wildfires in the scrub lands and forests that surround the city. Marsh’s dream is to get his team certified for Type 1 status, usually reserved for U.S. Forest Service teams, to be deployed wherever wildfires were raging.

Marsh persuades his boss, the town’s fire chief, Duane Steinbrink (Jeff Bridges), to lobby the city council to pursue Type 1 status — which, he says, will protect Prescott when wildfires threaten the city. Marsh gets to work training his men and preparing them for a federal inspector.

His preparations are intercut in the film with the story of one recruit, Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller). We meet McDonough as a drug-addled screw-up, kicked out of the basement by his mom (Rachel Singer) and unable to provide for the woman (Natalie Hall) he got pregnant. His application to the fire crew draws laughter from the other guys, but Marsh gives him a chance (for reasons that become clear as the story progresses).

Kosinski (“Tron: Legacy”) and screenwriters Ken Nolan (“Black Hawk Down”) and Eric Warren Singer (“American Hustle”) focus much of the movie’s time on the bond between the men — with a cast that includes James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch and Geoff Stults. But equal time is devoted to the men and their wives and girlfriends, particularly in the loving but sometimes tempestuous relationship between Marsh and his horse-trainer wife, Amanda (Jennifer Connelly).

While the supporting players struggle to stand out from the crowd, the leads emit fireworks as hot as the blazes the crew battles. Connelly and Brolin are dynamic together, as are Brolin’s scenes mentoring the hotheaded Teller. And Teller shows McDonough’s maturing, as he grows from messed-up recruit to responsible young firefighter, in quick, understated strokes, even against the massive special effects Kosinski distributes throughout the film.

It’s only in the final half-hour, in the depiction of the fatal Yarnell Hill fire, that the clichés Kosinski & Co. so carefully dodge begin to engulf the movie. Bits of portentous dialogue — such as when Marsh blithely tells Amanda, “I should be back for supper” — weigh down the drama, reminding viewers that we’re counting down to these characters’ doom.

There’s no doubt the men of the Granite Mountain Hotshots earned every tribute given to them, and much of “Only the Brave” delivers that. But these men also deserve a movie that doesn’t cheapen their story with emotional shortcuts.