Minor plot spoilers follow, but I won’t go into the climax and resolution.

The logline of the plot: The teenage Hmong boy living next door to Eastwood is pressured to join a gang. Eastwood sees value in the kid and becomes his mentor.

In VERY broad terms, the story follows the Casablanca template. The hero has renounced values and has become a cynic. He hates the world. Then he finds a value worth fighting for. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t — damn it, I care!” It’s a powerful story that always works in the movies.

Aside from Eastwood, who plays Kowalski perfectly, there is an after school TV amateurishness to much of the acting and writing. The dialogue is wretched. At one point a Hmong girl lectures Kowalski about “our culture.” Gag.

I noticed a false note. Kowalski tells this joke in a bar to two other white guys: “A Mexican, a Jew and a colored guy walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Get the f**k out.’” Would Kowalski say “a colored guy”? Wouldn’t he use the N-word? Although he uses every other racial epithet, the movie didn’t have the stones to go all the way. Perhaps they feared the audience would dislike the central character. It was a mistake; if a character is a racist, make him a racist.

Kowalski’s transformation from mean to cuddly is a little too easy and unmotivated. A man who starts out telling the Hmong to stay off his yard has to be forced into interacting with them and getting to know them.

Aside from the amateurishness and multicultural pieties, the movie is pretty good. There is enough good stuff to make it a diverting entertainment for an evening, but it certainly is not great art. Kowalski is a Korean War veteran who still has his army rifle; he loves America and he has a garage full of tools. He is an interesting fellow to get to know. Kowalski and his Gran Torino symbolize an America now gone: a time when men and cars had muscle.

This ghastly sewer is what naturalism has done to the superhero story. It used to be about heroes for children; now it’s a celebration of evil with tormented heroes who are Byronic at best, psychotic beasts at worst.

If this is the end, I put the beginning of the end in 1969, when Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, two young men with tremendous talent, were given Green Lantern, whose sales were sagging. Green Lantern was paired with the second-rate hero Green Arrow. O’Neil and Adams were given remarkable creative freedom as DC searched for ways to compete with the juggernaut Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were creating over at Marvel.

O’Neil and Adams brought “social conscience” to superhero comic books. As with Zola in serious literature, naturalism in comics began as a sort of stolid, left-liberal propaganda. Their brief run culminated in a story in which Speedy, Green Arrow’s teenage sidekick, gets hooked on heroin.

This series marked the end of the Silver Age of Comic Books and the beginning of the Bronze Age. The age of innocence and sunlit heroism was over. It’s been downhill ever since. From then on comics would be increasingly dark, adult, tormented and violent. Heroes and villains would more likely have an ambiguous “shades of gray” morality instead of clear-cut good and evil.

That a movie such as The Dark Knight and music such as heavy metal can be as popular as they are today gives me pause. This art of nihilism and madness would not have been popular in America in 1969, when the Silver Age died.