'BASKETBALL' A SLAM DUNK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

If they gave out Oscars for truth in advertising, ``Love & Basketball'' would be the slam-dunk winner.

It's about two L.A. kids who love each other and basketball. One interferes, sometimes, with the other, but if it wasn't basketball, of course, it would be something else.

There's family conflict and I-am-woman uplift, too, but writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, a television creative making her assured big-screen debut with this, sticks pretty close to the basic game plan.

Omar Epps plays Quincy McCall, and Sanaa Lathan is Monica Wright. Baldwin Hills neighbors since pre-adolescence, they're closest friends and most competitive court rivals.

His dad (Dennis Haysbert) is a Clipper, but young Q looks up to him anyway. Her mom (Alfre Woodard) is a homemaker par excellence who wishes her scruffy tomboy would chuck the gym shorts occasionally and learn to wear a dress. When Q's parents have one of their regular arguments, it doesn't matter how ruthlessly he played against Monica that day; she supportively lets him sleep on her bedroom floor.

He graduates to the obvious by prom night, and they both join USC basketball teams as a couple. Q, with his natural talent, is on an easy fast track to the NBA. Monica, who has to struggle for every score, must work harder, and since there's no WNBA during most of the movie's timeframe (Prince-Bythewood divides the story into four periods, each some years apart), it's difficult to say what she's so adamantly pushing for.

Other than love of the game, of course. But at the risk of sacrificing that other kind of love?

Prince-Bythewood, a dedicated athlete herself, clearly knows all the emotional and physical details of a woman's life in sports. Some of Monica's trials are a bit pat, but the character's singlemindedness as well as her doubts are always credibly delineated.

But what really spikes the performance is the fact that Lathan, who's been seen in small roles in ``The Wood'' and ``The Best Man,'' never shot a hoop in her life before taking on Monica. Out there with mostly real amateur and semipro ballplayers, she looks like she belongs when Monica's good and, almost more impressively, when she's not (the latter being something like the physical equivalent of Marilyn Monroe playing dumb smart).

Quincy, as you might guess, isn't quite as well-imagined. He's given a less-than-convincing, ``life changing'' crisis with his dad at an age when the situation calls for low-intensity disappointment at best (and by then, Q should know all too well that being a Clipper means the old man's anything but perfect).

But Epps is not only a low-key charmer and a persuasive all-around athlete (check his filmography: baseball in ``Major League II,'' football in ``The Program,'' track in ``Higher Learning''), he's developed enough as an actor to bring palpable conviction to implausible or rote emotions. Like Quincy, he's a star player on the rise, and the matchup works well.

Prince-Bythewood also exhibits a nice, matter-of-fact feel for both of the film's milieux: the gracious, upscale African-American suburbs and the grittier realm of school sports, where the privileged protagonists go up against athletes for whom the game is much more a matter of survival than the love of their lives.

Speaking of which, ``Love & Basketball'' indeed goes all the way with its premise. There are several significant one-on-one games; the sexy one sounds ridiculous on paper, but man, is it ever proof that some things in movies are all about the playing.

THE FACTS

--The film: ``Love & Basketball'' (PG-13; sex, language).

--The stars: Omar Epps, Sanaa Lathan, Alfre Woodard, Dennis Haysbert, Debbi Morgan.

--Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Produced by Spike Lee and Sam Kitt. Released by New Line Cinema.

--Running time: Two hours.

--Playing: Citywide.

--Our rating: Three stars

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo: Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan star as childhood friends and rivals who play well - in both games - in the aptly titled ``Love & Basketball,'' now playing citywide.

Box: THE FACTS (see text)