Making good on the promise of their Sundance winning short Gowanus, Brooklyn, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden captured the ennui and moral complexity of a young, damaged idealist caught in the pervasive malaise of the Bush years with the compelling and self assured feature debut Half Nelson, a film whose stature continues to grow with each passing year. As this decade has worn on, it has proven more and more difficult for young directors, even those fresh out of Sundance with award winning and broadly distributed indie “hits”, to make second and third feature films. Those that do in many cases end up having to compromise their most cherished projects for participation in studio financed ventures that are often subject to the increasingly asinine narrative codes, the tired sub genres, of the specialty film marketplace (Sin Nombre, anyone?). So it was with much excitement but a bit of trepidation that I first encountered Sugar, Fleck and Boden’s follow up to their Oscar nominated little indie that could. I’m happy to report that with this delicate and persuasive drama about a young immigrant whose talent may not take him all the places he’s dreamed, Fleck and Boden have only confirmed their own remarkable gifts.

Sugar gets more right about the buzz and hum of a country baseball field at night, about the supremely mental engagement a pitcher has with his target and his body, about the half empty stands filled with devoted, beer swilling fans in minor league towns, than any narrative film to date. Algenis Perez Soto, a second basemen by trade who was discovered while the filmmakers toured Dominican baseball fields, plays the title character, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, a nineteen year old pitcher with mean but unrefined skills. He’s plucked from the Dominican after being discovered in a Major League developmental camp, leaving his family and girlfriend behind to play for the Bridgetown Swing, a Double A affiliate of Kansas City Knights in a small Iowa town. Displaced in middle America with only a middling grasp of English and cultural barriers everywhere he looks, he quickly discovers that his struggles with self doubt and loneliness will prove even more difficult than keeping his breaking ball down.

As Sugar moves from the security and camaraderie of the developmental camps in the Dominican to the highly competitive spring training complexes of Arizona, he quickly learns the cruel lessons of life in this particularly Darwinian marketplace. Although he’s promoted straight into the mid-level minor leagues as opposed to rookie ball, eagerly sending home much of his bi-weekly $550 check to his mother in order to help pay for an addition to their house, many of his friends from the Dominican are sent packing, their best laid plans already in tatters. Once in Iowa, Miguel initially has complete command of his gifts, but as injuries and emotional isolation both take their toll, his fortunes on the field and off careen in directions he couldn’t have anticipated.

Fleck and Boden bring us into the psychology of the athlete with a nimble and controlled style that departs from the hand held indie realist stylistics of Half Nelson. Using slick dolly moves, whip pans and shot opening focus racks, they give a graceful formalism to the game sequences. When Miguel, demoted to the bullpen and weary after a horrifying experiment with amphetamines to improve his play, flees the team to resettle in New York City, the frames grow more rigid, the lighting more claustrophobic.

As the film wears on it suggests Miguel’s experience, that of a young man who like so many strives for his own slice of the American Dream through its most enduring game, is a universal one, that of immigrants who struggle to adjust to our language and customs, to the harsh realities of American life on the margins. The film observes the solemn fact that most of these young men, including our protagonist, will most likely never see the inside of a Major League clubhouse. They will be plucked from their far-flung homelands and find their ways to cities like Binghamton, New York and Chattanooga, Tennessee, to a culture vastly different from their own, often with little preparation for what they will find, to show off their talent every night for little pay and sparse crowds.

Speaking of little pay and sparse crowds and Darwinian marketplaces, will anyone show up to see this film? Perhaps more to the point, will Sony Pictures Classics have any fresh ideas about how to get people to show up and see this film? I suspect not. Baseball films are historically poor box office performers and have no legs overseas, or so goes the conventional wisdom. While Sugar has been held back since its Sundance 08’ debut in order to drop at the beginning of baseball season, one doubts the corporate bosses, even at a Japanese owned multi-national, will give Michael Barker and Tom Bernard the ad muscle to get Sugar on billboards and busses, a tie-in ESPN Outside The Lines special, incessant television commercials during early season baseball games or its young directors on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, let alone to do the outreach in the Latin community that could drive the film toward the type of people it actually depicts. I hope I’m wrong, because Wolverine can’t field a ground ball to save his life –- why should he get all the attention?