In their breakout indie film Half-Nelson, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck squeezed oceans of emotion behind the impassive face of a seen-it-all schoolkid, dealing with an adored teacher's drug addiction.

The canvas is far larger in Sugar -- Boden and Fleck's terrifically human account of a young Dominican pitcher's discomfiting odyssey from his tiny village to a major league training camp to A-ball in the American Midwest. But it's still a tale told through an impassive face struggling to restrain pain and disappointment.

That face belongs to Algenis Perez Soto, who plays the title character 'Sugar' Santos -- so named, he claims, for his prowess with the ladies, and later for the sweetness of the knuckler curve a pro scout teaches him (a secret weapon that becomes his ticket to America).

The movie opens buoyantly -- a joyous celebration of Sugar's hometown life that plays in stark contrast to the loss of equilibrium that will afflict him when his "dream" comes true. He has a mother, sister and girlfriend he loves, a skill for building furniture he inherited from his late father, and friends who seem utterly comfortable with each other. The training camp invite he gets from the fictional Kansas City Knights only intensifies the joy he feels in the place he belongs (even as long-lost uncles and cousins line up to get on the gravy train).

It's interesting that this movie was made, as they say, "without the express written permission of Major League Baseball" (the only real team named is the New York Yankees). Sugar doesn't exactly excoriate MLB, but it does suggest a level of neglect of the personal struggles of the hundreds of Latin Americans it squeezes into the bottom rung of its superstructure every year.

A stranger in a strange land, Santos first finds himself in the KC training camp in Phoenix, getting lessons from his catcher/best friend Jorge (Rayniel Rufino) -- stuff like don't drink from the hotel mini-bar or order the in-room porn. Under his tutlelage, the other Latinos learn to order French toast (and only French toast) from the diner. (Jorge later becomes an object lesson of another sort, when a nagging injury keeps him confined at the bottom.)

But it's when Santos is sent to KC's A-ball affiliate in Iowa that Alice falls through the looking glass. He's placed in the care of a caricaturistic, God-fearing, baseball-loving family that speaks no Spanish (beyond cornpone dictums like "no cervesa, no chickas"). The daughter, torn between her attraction for Sugar and her Bible club celibacy, sends him mixed signals that are especially inappropriate in a small town whose racism lies barely below the surface. It's a place where arrogant white pitching coaches say "I know what you're going through," to black Latino prospects who don't understand a word the coach is saying.

Sugar is not a sports film typical of the genre (although the game play is more realistic than most). What makes it different is its ultimate disinterest in the game and its insistence on keeping its eye on the ball of its protagonist's humanity. What may be seen by some as an irrational act or a weakness of character becomes a last-act stand for Santos to finally find America on his terms.

(This film is rated 14A)
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