‘Sugar’ doesn’t follow sports movie formula

For their previous film, the indie filmmaking duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck explored the turmoil in a schoolteacher’s life, and “Half Nelson” was one of the best movies of its year.

Their follow-up picture has a completely different milieu, but the turmoil continues. “Sugar” is about a young Dominican baseball prospect, a pitcher whose entry into the U.S. minor-league system gives the filmmakers a much bigger canvas than just another sports story.

The central character is Miguel “Sugar” Santos, a teenager with a wicked curveball. He’s played by first-time actor Algenis Perez Soto, who has some baseball experience in his past.

In his village in the Dominican Republic, people keep asking Miguel when he’s going to the States. Everybody would like him to succeed, but maybe for their own reasons.

When Miguel is indeed whisked away to Iowa to play in the farm system of a fictitious major league club, the culture shock is intense. The only English words he knows are a handful of key baseball terms (“I got it! I got it!” for instance).

So it’s hard to express himself in the American heartland. Even ordering food is tricky; the only menu item at the local Denny’s he recognizes is French toast, and he just keeps getting it. Even for dinner. “The food is really sweet here,” he tells his family back home.

For the first half of the film, Miguel’s experiences feel pretty familiar. It’s in the final sections that Boden and Fleck begin to explore their real subject.

So many sports pictures are about the guy who makes it, the underdog who comes off the bench to score the winning touchdown or the game-ending basket. In the real world, those are the exceptions; “Sugar” is about the majority of sports hopefuls, the guys who have to struggle just to get on the lowest rung.

In telling that story, Boden and Fleck have set themselves a tough sell. Of course, Miguel’s journey isn’t the rule, either; what about young players who eagerly learn English, or enjoy traveling away from their homes?

And the movie has another hurdle: Where Ryan Gosling brought an exciting actor’s energy to “Half Nelson,” Algenis Perez Soto, while an appealing presence, does not bring anything similar to the game.

The little details are right, though. In the shots of a small-town ballpark next to a bridge, or the poignant way Miguel glimpses Yankee Stadium from an elevated train, Boden and Fleck show their feeling for uniquely American spaces and stories. And for showing them in a new way.