Fastpitch

At 35, New York conceptual artist Jeremy Spear trades gallery openings for the fast-pitch softball circuit, eagerly sallying forth with mitt -- and digital camera -- in hand. Hoping to stoke the flames of competition, which burned so brightly during his varsity days at Yale, Spear instead joins a boozy, boisterous, barn-burning brotherhood, headquartered in an Ashland, Ohio battery shop. Indefatigable manager Nick McCurry struggles to keep the team together, aided by the players' heartland camaraderie, shotgunned cans of Genessee, and indomitable spirit: “A purity,” the narration declares, “that's hard to find in sports today.” Betwixt montages of mullethead Midwesterners and car-window cornfields, shortstop Spear bunks in fleabag motels and becomes a “lefty slapper” in time for the inevitable Big Game. Yet it's the journey and the colorful crew of Spear's fellow travelers, not the destination, that make this ride genuinely absorbing. Indeed, the fast-pitch players are a confederation of races and nations. Spear's teammate Shane Hunuhunu, a strapping Maori power hitter with nocturnal habits and a day job at a car wash, is so fired up for the game that he turns cartwheels on the diamond. Ojibway tribesman Darren Zack cuts an imposing figure on the mound for the Toronto Gators, and a team of clean-living Canadian natives introduces the World Championship with a Lakota anthem. Meanwhile, despicable junk-mail magnate and sports-franchise dilettante Peter J. Porcelli, Jr. threatens to befoul the sport with his Tampa Bay Smokers, a mercenary team with a $500,000 budget, vintage-styled virgin wool uniforms, a mascot, and a posse of bikini girls. It's such high sports drama you'd swear this documentary is fiction, capped off with what could be the most depressing denouement since Bang the Drum Slowly. Yet at times Spear seems like a tourist in this earthy milieu, and viewers from the flyover may wince at the length of the learning curve between his initial New York-centrism and the proclamation that he is “a Midwesterner at heart.” Nonetheless, his enthusiasm is infectious, and his crew's seamless camerawork and brisk editing is anything but bush league. By the final inning (softball has seven) this personal, affectionate chronicle does its unsung heroes proud.