When it was published in 2003, "The Kite Runner" could not have been better timed, bringing the life and culture of Afghanistan to an America largely wary of the country with which it had gone to war just two years before. Now, Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel and favorite of book clubs everywhere has been given the screen adaptation it richly deserves in Marc Forster's film of the same name.

Fans of Hosseini's spare but densely detailed book will most likely cheer the fealty and sensitivity Forster has shown toward the original text, which deeply affected millions of readers with its tale of friendship, family, loyalty and betrayal. Gorgeously filmed in Northern California and China (which stands in for Afghanistan), "The Kite Runner," like the book itself, is simple and elegant. This is a movie that knows better than to overreach.

Which is not to say that it isn't dazzling cinema. Filmed with crystalline clarity by Roberto Schaefer, it's a bold, often soaring treat for the eye. After a brief opening sequence in modern-day California, the film jumps back to 1970s Kabul, when the country was in the throes of a communist revolution and an impending Soviet invasion. Twelve-year-old Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) lives with the prosperous widowed father he calls Baba (Homayoun Ershadi) in a beautiful house on the city's outskirts. Amir's best friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), the family servant's son from the stigmatized Hazari tribe. As the boys do what boys do in Kabul -- go to the movies, get into mischief, fly brightly colored kites -- they are routinely bullied by kids of Amir's privileged Pashtun sect.

After one of Kabul's cherished "kite fighting" tournaments, Hassan runs afoul of some of those bullies, who rape him with bestial brutality. Amir looks on without interceding, and the ensuing shame will haunt him the rest of his life, from his escape with his father from Soviet forces to California, where they settle into emigre downward mobility similar to that depicted in the 2003 drama "House of Sand and Fog." Several years after they leave Afghanistan, Amir, now a successful novelist in his late 30s, receives a phone call offering a way for him to put things right.

It's a sweeping story, spanning generations, continents and myriad political upheavals, but Forster ("Monster's Ball," "Finding Neverland," "Stranger Than Fiction") has superb control, never stooping to awkward exposition, letting Afghanistan's tortured history play out as an oblique but crucial background to the characters' fraught dynamics.

The focus is on the two fatally linked protagonists, whose relationship seems to echo Afghanistan's cycle of misery. Forster's biggest challenge, to many readers, was to find just the right actors for the characters who, by the end of the book, were every bit as authentic as real-life friends and family. He succeeded: Ebrahimi and Mahmidzada ring perfectly true as the ambivalent master and the martyred, supremely devoted servant. Mahmidzada is particularly indelible -- and heartbreaking -- as Hassan, a figure of unconditional love and noble suffering.

For all the pain, loss and displacement it depicts, "The Kite Runner" remains a film of exhilarating, redemptive humanity, conveying an enduring sense of hope. Like the dancing, darting kites of its title -- which can either be weapons or objects of avian grace -- the ultimate image is that of a people, and a country, who can soar despite being tethered to an impossibly burdensome history.