Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

As the two ballplayers sit in the locker room, Miguel 'Sugar' Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) in a broken English asks teammate Brad (Andre Holland) what else it is he does besides playing baseball. He'd studied history in college, says Brad, endearingly called 'Flaco' ('Slim,') by his teammates. In a film so baseball heavy up to this point, scenes of intense training in the Dominican Republic flooding in one after the other, this moment is the first in which diligent pitcher Sugar intimates any sense of confusion about his life's journey in the minor leagues. In a silent way, it's the breaking point for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's hopeful humanist vision Sugar. While the film does comment on the bittersweet realities for Dominican ballplayers in the American leagues, Sugar is so much more than its documentary influenced observation of human existence. It's a story of a man finding himself and living for the sake to satisfy not others' expectations but his own course of happiness.

A plodding film at times, painstaking in its unshakable patience, Sugar is also always lovely, ever considerate and gracefully brilliant. In a follow-up to their phenomenal debut feature Half Nelson, Boden and Fleck offer no less here than a precision of storytelling, shot design and naturalistic performance all that illuminate the necessity for constant discovery of self. It's a film worthy of all the beauty of true humanity uncertainty and its necessary spiritual resolution.

Story opens on wicked spike curve pitcher Sugar, who with a natural swagger gently dominates his training camp, family and friends. When he's sent off to spring training in Arizona and later lands on an Iowa-based minor league team, Sugar finds his confidence shaken. Lacking a mastery of a new language and confused by the timid sexual signals of midwest Christian cutie Anne Higgins (Ellary Porterfield), Sugar leans heavily on friends Brad and Jorge (Rayniel Rufino) to support his transition. Transfers of both players and a minor injury sustained, Sugar progressively loses his mental footing, watching from the sidelines a former Dominican trainee comrade take his once acclaimed position on the mound.

Trained ballplayer, first time actor Perez Soto grips every emotion without the least bit of sentimentality, his impeccable focus making for an organic performance, even in a particularly dreamlike sequence that envisions reality through the vehicle of steroid use. Holland and Rufino are also particularly charming in supporting roles, their calm natures making Sugar's crisis all the more silently desperate. Latecomer Jaime Tirelli, who plays Osvaldo, an unexpected friend and sanctuary for Sugar as he stumbles in seeking out a new life path, supports the beautiful, realist story arc with incredible ease.

Both cinematographer Andrij Parekh and Boden, who also served as the film's editor, deserve kudos for crafting a feature at times hypnotic and at others vividly distinct. Parekh's intimate portraits of players feel at times like engaged ethnographic studies, Boden's cuts making a fluid blend of fantasy and reality. A lullaby of what dreams have come and gone, Sugar ends ultimately with what dreams remain.