Jeff Bridges plays aging country musician Bad Blake in the upcoming movie “Crazy Heart,” based on the novel of the same name by Rhode Island College English professor and Foster resident Thomas Cobb.

Lorey Sebastian

Unlike the story it tells, Tom Cobb’s first novel, “Crazy Heart,” will have a happy ending: After being out of print for 22 years, the Rhode Island College English professor’s first novel is about to become a major motion picture.

“Crazy Heart” the movie makes its premiere in Los Angeles on Dec. 8, followed by a limited release in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 16. Already it’s being touted as an Oscar contender.

“A few weeks ago ‘Crazy Heart’ was just another invisible movie, one with so little promise that the company that made it refused to put it into theaters,” Michael Cieply wrote Wednesday in The New York Times online. “Now, suddenly, this low-budget film about a washed-up country singer finds itself at the heart of the Oscar race, with some awards watchers calling its star, Jeff Bridges, a likely best actor candidate.”

Cobb himself seems more excited by the prospect that his book, which was taken out of publication after selling around 20,000 copies two decades ago, is being resurrected. HarperCollins plans to reprint it as a paperback to capitalize on the movie release.

“That makes me really happy that they’re going to re-release the novel,” Cobb says. “That seems the biggest thing to me. It will be back in print again.”

Cobb, a Foster resident, has been a peripheral character in the story of how his novel became a film. One person bought the rights and sold them to another, who sold them to another and another and another. Cobb can’t recall all its owners, just that there were many.

“The movie seems unreal to me. I haven’t had anything to do with it. I’ve sort of been watching from a distance on blogs.”

The film, produced by Fox Searchlight Pictures, stars Robert Duvall, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Bridges, who plays the protagonist, a washed-up, alcoholic country western musician named Bad Blake who has been reduced to playing with teenage band members and performing in bowling alleys.

“One of the things that really pleases me about the movie is that T-Bone Burnett is overseeing the music,” Cobb says. “I’ve known him a long time. When I was doing music, I interviewed him in 1983 in a little club in Houston.”

That’s where “Crazy Heart” begins. In 1984, Cobb earned his doctorate in creative writing at the University of Houston. And “Crazy Heart” was Cobb’s dissertation, drawing on his experiences in Texas and in Arizona, where he was editor of a publication for country western music.

COBB’S BOOK WAS published in 1987 by HarperCollins, and its movie rights were first purchased by Chuck Barris of “Gong Show” fame, who undertook to turn the book into a movie, but never did. Then the movie rights were sold repeatedly over the next 20 years. Early on, Cobb’s agent asked him if he’d be interested in writing the screenplay.

“I said no. I wanted to get to work on another novel.”

Besides, Cobb says, “I don’t really know anything about screenplays. I tried writing one one time and it was a disaster. I dug it out of my file cabinet one day and I was going to throw it away. But I decided to keep it as a reminder of my mortality.”

The movie was written and directed by Scott Cooper, a first-time filmmaker, an actor who might be best known for his role in the AMC miniseries “Broken Trail.”

Cobb says he’ll receive a private screening of the movie before its premiere, and he’s looking forward to that. But because he’s a writer, what he’s most looking forward to is seeing his book back in bookstores.

“This will mean I’ll have three books in print. It kind of makes me feel like Shakespeare.”

In addition to “Crazy Heart,” Cobb has written “Shave Tail” (2006, Scribner) and a short-story collection, “Acts of Contrition” (2003, Texas Review Press). Now he’s working on a fourth book, “Blood in Their Eyes,” that he expects to be published in the spring.

With the exception of one short story based in Rhode Island, all of Cobb’s work is set in Texas and Arizona. “It’s like I moved myself and my belongings to the East Coast, but my imagination stayed out West,” he says.

“It’s bizarre that people will be interested in reading the book because an actor read it and that it’s being turned into a movie,” he says. “On the other hand, people will be reading the book. It’s hard to be grumpy about that.”

Nor is he surprised to see it become a film.

“My first real experience with narrative was watching movies on television. I was watching television long before I learned to read. So it’s natural that I tell stories visually.”

Those who have read “Crazy Heart” will see a slightly different story in the movie. The main character, Bad Blake, encounters a female reporter who helps him get his life back in order. It’s a story of recovery and redemption, which isn’t entirely Cobb’s story.

“I understand the novel is much more grim than the movie. I sort of expected that. When I was writing the novel, I was torn between an upbeat and a downbeat ending. Donald Barthelme, my adviser, encouraged me to do downbeat. His exact words were, ‘I want to see him with a busted head in the pea patch.’ I’ve decided he was right. I also assumed when they did the movie that they’d do a more upbeat ending. Hollywood likes things that are generally positive.”

The Bad Blake character, Cobb says, is a composite of the country western legend Hank Thompson, who died New Year’s Day in 1953, and Cobb’s former doctoral adviser, Donald Barthelme, a National Book Award winner still regarded as one of the giants in postmodernist fiction. Barthelme died in 1989, two years after “Crazy Heart” was issued.

“Bad Blake has been good to me. He built my house several years ago. And this year he remodeled my house.”

brourke@projo.com