As the country’s deadliest sniper, with more than 160 confirmed kills, Chris Kyle put his life on the line during the Iraq War and in the process saved hundreds of fellow U.S. soldiers’ lives.

Such legendary battlefield exploits have all the makings of a great war film.

And it does. But that’s only part of Kyle’s story — the easiest part for a film to cover.

But as we’ve seen in the course of Clint Eastwood’s directorial career, he’s not interested in easy.

COMMENTARY: Academy Award nominations far from perfect

In the filmmaker’s acclaimed Western Unforgiven, for example, Eastwood adds a twist to the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black genre motif, with Eastwood as a murderous outlaw anti-hero and Gene Hackman as a morally corrupt sheriff.

It’s much the same with American Sniper, a film about a national hero that doesn’t succumb to hero worship. Rather, its thrust is the stark honesty of the price of wartime heroism.

As a soldier on the battlefield, Kyle was nearly flawless. But as a soldier at home with his wife, Kyle was flawed and damaged, the result of a war he could leave but that never really left him.

The film is based on Kyle’s New York Times best-selling autobiography, and Eastwood’s adaptation is equal measures stirring and thrilling in its depiction of harrowing battles in which death could be waiting behind every locked door. Yet American Sniper’s biggest asset is its ability to place audiences who have never experienced the horrors of war outside of a movie theater into the mind and body of someone who has.

That has as much to do with Bradley Cooper’s transformative and Oscar-nominated performance as Kyle, a role that required the actor to beef up, speak with a perfect West Texas accent, and maintain a heroic posture until a final tense gun battle between U.S. soldiers and Iraqi insurgents pushed Kyle — who was on his fourth tour of duty — to the breaking point.

Cooper's Kyle wants little to do with his legend, but simply to do his job and save the lives of fellow soldiers. His trouble is that he's so good at killing, he can't let himself quit for fear it will cost the lives of those he loves.

But it wasn't what he did on the battlefield that remained with Kyle, as he confides to a military shrink in first dealing with his post-traumatic stress disorder. "The thing that haunts me are all the guys I couldn't save," he says.

Kyle, in fact, was tragically killed by one who couldn't be saved, a returning Iraq War vet struggling in his post-war life. Kyle, who was helping such veterans as part of his own therapy, met Eddie Ray Routh at his East Texas home, and drove to a shooting range, where Routh shot Kyle in the back, along with Kyle's companion, Chad Littlefield, who was also there to help the vet.

Eastwood ends American Sniper with real-life footage of Kyle's funeral procession: a hero's honor, as fellow veterans and civilians stood in salute along Texas highways as the hearse bearing Kyle's body drove by.

It's one of many moments that could have gone wrong, plying audience empathy with tears of a hero's death. But in the context of a man who sacrificed so much, such a tribute is not only fitting but necessary.

As for the complications of the real-life Kyle, Eastwood doesn't hold back. Kyle is a redneck from Odessa, Texas, the son of a strict and religious father who challenged Kyle to "protect" his younger and smaller brother.

"We protect our own," the father lectures to the brothers at the family dinner table. "If someone tries to fight you or tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it."

As an adult, Kyle was a bronco rodeo rider with a quick temper and a fondness for beer, guns, and his country. It's the 1998 terror attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that convince him to put the latter two to use by joining the Navy Seals, where he showcases his unparalleled marksmanship.

In his first test as a sniper in Iraq, Kyle must determine whether to kill a mother and a young boy who may or may not be holding a bomb in front of advancing American forces. This would be the first of many difficult decisions for Kyle, who finishes one tour of duty only to return for more. His eagerness to return to his fellow soldiers weighs heavily on his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller, who delivers in a small but important role), who is faced with raising their two children on her own, while wondering if she will ever see her husband again.

Taya isn't a minor character to flesh out Kyle's story, but an essential part of the film's message about sacrifice — by the soldiers and the ones they leave behind. Kyle and Taya's relationship is the love story you want for your best friend: They meet at a bar, they move in together, they fall in love, they marry. But there's a hitch in their honeymoon, as Kyle learns during his wedding party that he and his group are soon shipping out for their first combat mission.

It's a tug-of-war for his attention that Taya will face for the next several years. And even when Kyle returns to her, he's not really there with her. When they bring home their first child after his first tour of duty, he's watching videos of insurgent sniper attacks.

"It's not about them. It's about us," she says. "You have to make it back to us, OK?"

Later she tells him that she needs him "to be human again."

Kyle is obsessed with an Iraqi sniper named Mustafa. And Mustafa is equally obsessed with Kyle. It's an effective means of conflict and tension, that is most certainly exaggerated. It also adds another dramatic layer to a narrative that bounces between Iraq and Kyle's home, and employs the occasional phone call between Kyle and Taya that connects the two worlds.

It's a connection that in Kyle's mind is increasingly one-sided.

Even after returning to the United States for good, he's holed up in a bar, drinking to forget, as his wife calls to ask him where he is.

"I guess I just needed a minute," he tells her, his voice starting to break from the mental fatigue of his service to our country.

It's these moments that elevate American Sniper beyond a jingoistic refrain and into a relevant reminder of the sacrifice of war, even to its biggest heroes.

First Published January 16, 2015, 5:00 a.m.