A Love Song for Bobby Long is a 2004 American psychological drama film directed and written by Shainee Gabel, based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps.

It stars John Travolta as the title character, an aging alcoholic, and Scarlett Johansson as a headstrong young woman who returns to New Orleans, Louisiana after her estranged mother's death.

After her mother Lorraine, a jazz singer whom she felt neglected her for her career, dies from a drug overdose, 18-year-old Purslane “Pursy” Hominy Will leaves a Florida trailer park, where she lives with an abusive boyfriend, to return to her hometown of New Orleans, after having dropped out of high school and left the city.

She is surprised to find strangers living in her mother's dilapidated home: Bobby Long, a former professor of literature at Auburn University, and his protégé and former teaching assistant, Lawson Pines, a struggling writer.

Bobby - slovenly and suffering from ailments he prefers to ignore - tries to improve Pursy by introducing her to the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; he also encourages her to return to high school and get her degree.

"[7] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote "What can be said is that the three actors inhabit this material with ease and gratitude: It is good to act on a simmer sometimes, instead of at a fast boil.

"[8] Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film is, deep-down, a redemptive makeover story drenched in alcohol, Southern literature, and the damp romanticism of the bohemian lush life in New Orleans.

If there's something a little bit moldy about the setup (drunken literary types, hope on the doorstep, healing from beyond the grave), the movie is no less charming or involving for it, and it's no less pleasant to succumb to its wayward allure and wastrel lyricism.