Available on DVD: “The Sessions”

The hard part for The Sessions won’t be to win the hearts of audiences. As disarmingly funny and as well acted as it is, director Ben Lewin’s film is all but guaranteed to do that. The trick is persuading people to see it in the first place.

That’s because, although it arrives as one of the most enjoyable DVDs of the young year it is a hard sell, thanks to its deceivingly off-putting one-sentence summary: A man in an iron lung hires a sex surrogate to help him lose his virginity before he dies.

I know that noise I'm hearing is the sound of people clicking through Pete’s Place looking for something a tad more uplifting to rent. It’s also the sound of people making a terrible mistake.

That’s because The Sessions isn’t merely a depressing, less-arty riff on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or some other well-intended but emotionally exhausting film in which courage trumps paralysis. Rather, it is a beautiful and inspiring story that celebrates the human spirit, underscores the value of emotional connections, and invites viewers to laugh along with it at the beautifully embarrassing urges that remind us that we aren’t as far removed from Australopithecus Afarensis as we like to pretend.

It’s also because the man at the center of Lewin’s real-life story isn’t prone to depressing thoughts. Portrayed in an award-worthy turn by the underrated but brilliant John Hawkes, his name is Mark O’Brien and he, after contracting polio as a child, defied all expectations — medical and otherwise — to become a college graduate, a journalist and poet, and, above all, a 38-year-old. All this, despite being unable to move from the neck down and confined for the majority of his day to an iron lung.

It’s a device with which O’Brien has a love-hate relationship. Without it, he’d be unable to breathe on his own. At the same time, though, it has a way of cramping his style with the ladies. And so, afraid of dying before ever knowing the intimacy of sex, he decides to hire a "sex surrogate" — which is apparently a thing — to help him check that particular box off his bucket list.

What’s most impressive about Hawkes’ performance is the way he fills the screen with life and personality despite being able to move only his head, and then only 90 degrees. You want to find out how good an actor is? Take away his toolbox and see what he can do. In Hawkes’ case, he accomplishes something remarkable.

A quiet co-star of such movies such as Winter’s Bone (a role for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and Martha Marcy May Marlene, Hawkes’ beanpole frame and piercing eyes usually land him roles as grungy and slightly psychopathic felons. In The Sessions, he gets an opportunity to demonstrate his range, and he seizes it. Not only does he change his physical comportment — contorting his slight frame with a frightening degree of believability — but he alters his voice as well. Gone is any hint of the strength or defiance that movie watchers are used to hearing from him. For his O’Brien, even words are work, and so his voice becomes reedy and weak and convincingly laborious.

Despite the broken body, the hollow voice, the reliance on a hulking medical device to stay alive, however, Hawkes makes it clear that his O’Brien is more than the sum of his medical issues. Within the film’s first 15 minutes, his personality and his wry wit take over.

Some of the most amusing moments come during his regular visits to his parish priest (William H. Macy) to talk things out — and to seek pre-emptive absolution for his premeditated fornication. But it is Helen Hunt, as O’Brien’s sex surrogate, who provides the film’s emotional center.

Her name is Cheryl, and she’s a pro, so she approaches it all clinically — very straight-forwardly, very matter-of-factly and very, very nakedly. As caring and supportive as she is of O’Brien’s emotional needs, she makes it clear: to her, sex with him is just an act — just therapy.

It has to be, really, given the potential for emotional entanglements in her line of work. In fact, that’s why they are limited to no more than six sessions together. Still, she isn’t surprised when it becomes more than "just therapy" to O’Brien. She is blindsided, however, when the same happens to her.

The result is a human drama that quietly argues that the gift of life isn’t one to be taken lightly. As such, it’s also stands to be a wonderfully rewarding film, both for Hawkes — who richly deserved the awards he received for this performance and who should have been nominated for an Oscar — and for those reading this smart enough to take a chance on it with a rental.