It could be the story of the space program, with Clint Eastwood standing in for all of us. In the early days of the moon race, we came agonizingly close to the stars, but then circumstances beyond our control made the dream grind to a halt. The next few decades are all about disappointment.

We can approach Space Cowboys as triple-threat (director/producer/star) Clint's way of finally getting a chance to see the dream come true.

Maybe it is. Eastwood seems unwilling to waste much time fretting about how his subject matter -- a 70-year-old engineer and his three equally grizzled friends ride a space shuttle and save the day -- will play in Cape Canaveral or any of the world's less prestigious science fiction clubs. He plays fast and loose with the now-sanctified timeline of the Space Age, but he's not about to apologize for it.

Unlike other recent SF filmmakers, Clint leaves it up to his audience to suspend their own disbelief. And the reward for letting go of the realities of astronaut selection is that we get to share Clint's ride, live the dream.

And, really, it's a fairy tale. How realistic did you expect a movie about four senior citizens with only a month to train for an unusually strenuous shuttle mission was going to be?

It's not about realism. For this movie, reality is like gravity or the aging process -- it slows things down and keeps you from walking on the moon.

Once you realize Space Cowboys is a fairy tale, it's a lot of fun. Clint, Tommy Lee Jones and sidekicks James Garner (playing an especially demented test pilot-turned-preacher) and Donald Sutherland (as a sexagenarian self-described "babe magnet") don't really act so much as they act up.

Likewise, the plot -- ostensibly about an ailing Russian communications satellite, with some wrinkles -- seems less the motivator of events than an excuse for Clint and company to act up. When the plot gets in the way of the boys' shenanigans, Eastwood ignores it, often letting long stretches of film go by before deciding it's time to get back to business.

To a viewer trained on Kubrick's hyper-dense film philosophy or the minimalist spectacle of Star Wars, in which every frame and every detail gets cut if it doesn't set up an explosion ahead, this relaxed approach can seem lazy, but it's like calling a Charlie Parker solo "lazy" -- Eastwood's laconic style isn't about coloring between the lines.

Behind this relaxed jazz approach, Space Cowboys even manages to teach us a few things about our often-frustrating relationship with space and the space program.

First, it's handy to pull back now and then and let a space-industry outsider -- as Clint is -- remind us why we're going through all this effort in the first place. If space travel can't inspire wonder, why bother?

If anything, the film suffers slightly by caricaturing NASA a bit too enthusiastically as an overly restrictive organization -- in effect, for having strangled the Space Cowboys' dreams by aiming its sights too low.

Clint's fun-loving friends are constantly held up as counter-examples to a humorless NASA establishment embodied by a sinister project manager (perennial heavy James Cromwell) and dour new-generation astronaut Loren Dean. Some characters eventually loosen up, but there's never room to doubt just who the bad guys are.

We've been trained to believe that space is a game for the young -- although there are no official age limits for astronaut training, the everyday person would be hard-pressed to think of astronauts being older than their late 30s.

Even science fiction, the daydream of space travel, is considered a diversion for those who never grow up, and adolescents grown old before their time.

Everyone who remembers seeing men walk on the moon is in their mid-to-late-30s by now, and most are older. Younger space enthusiasts may not realize it, but that's a long time to wait for a dream to come true.

Those decades of waiting and dreaming dig deep into Space Cowboys and the irrepressible title foursome, dead ringers for Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

None of them ever grew up, and at the end, they remember how to fly.

And in the meantime, the fact is that the future belongs, should belong, to all of us, irrespective of age. It's okay to keep reaching for the stars for our children's sake -- for future generations -- but maybe it's time to start doing it for our parents' sake too.

Clint and the boys may refuse to grow up, but that doesn't mean any of us are getting any younger.