Sugar (2008)

The World Series stands at 3 to 2 New York and we check in hoping to see the Yankees blow it. The Cubs and Wrigley Field have a new owner from Omaha because the Tribune has sold everything down to its last pint of desk drawer bourbon. This week is last call for baseball.

Here's one for the road. A Dominican kid has got an arm. He leaves his family for the farm system riding everyone's high hopes. Progressing from training camp in Arizona to Single A in Iowa nothing goes terribly wrong, but the kid's game begins to falter. He sees the system doing what it's supposed to do: weed out. He lies to his mother on the phone about how things are going. He spends time lost. Slowly he sights his passion anew, where always it had been.

Sugar is the second indie drama from newcomer Ryan Fleck to completely stun me. Fleck seems to have an instinctive understanding for the texture of places and the people to be found there, as he proves by putting an educated white crack addict into an all-black Brooklyn junior high and displacing a monolingual athlete from the DR to the urban southwest to a Christian youth group in the heartland to a Big Apple flophouse and making each of these scenarios feel completely authentic.