Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algeniz Perez Soto) is a Dominican pitcher who travels to Iowa to break into baseball's big leagues in Sugar. (Denton Hanna/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The title Sugar is the nickname given to Miguel Santos, a maybe-great ballplayer who’s been incubating in the Dominican Republic awaiting his American breakthrough. Like its title, the film is saturated with sweetness, but what’s sour is heartbreakingly so. Clearing away the big-money fantasy that clouds professional sport, Sugar is a realist’s snapshot of a business that can be a pitiless fairy godmother, granting glory and then disposing of even the most gifted players.

Sugar moves like a sensitive, Spanish-speaking cousin to the great American basketball documentary Hoop Dreams.

To which you say: Well, duh. It’s not revelatory, perhaps, that economic interests can and do corrupt the grandeur of sport, particularly when let loose in an impoverished developing country. Sugar moves like a sensitive, Spanish-speaking cousin to the great American basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. But if the idea isn’t new, this particular young athlete is.

Sugar is played by a non-professional actor named Algenis Perez Soto. This natural (actor, that is, though he has a good arm, too) appears in almost every scene, building a gentle character bodily, often without access to the English language. Soto plays the baby pitcher as open and just a bit vulnerable, with more than a little of a jock’s swagger. He just might be a star.

In their breakthrough feature, Half Nelson (2006), husband-and-wife writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck flipped another genre, the noble teacher movie, making their heroic educator a heroin addict. The pair may gravitate towards meaty, socially relevant subjects, but they aren’t polemicists. The troubling system that has grown up around baseball never compromises the film’s love of the game. Funny and palpably warm, Sugar is bathed in the golds and yellows of a perpetual summer’s day. It’s bound together by an unwavering respect and affection for the universal poetry in the meeting of a bat, a ball and a green field.

Now 19, Sugar was signed at 16 to a baseball academy run by the fictitious Kansas City Knights. With his nominal salary, he’s been trying to build an addition to the tiny home where he was raised, having promised his mom a separate room for grandma. Sugar comes from a small village where unpaved roads are filled with kids knocking at his ankles for free baseballs. The camp where he lives is a contrasting slice of the U.S., with a locked gate, tidy tended gardens and fields that deny the heat through perpetual sprinklers. It seems like Sugar has been shipped off to a suburban orphanage, or a benign prison, where inmates/players are observed from a watchtower. As the players warm up, one American scout spots Sugar’s curveball and asks: “How’s that one?” It’s like he’s picking a cantaloupe, or seeking a hired hand to work his fields.

Sugar finds himself isolated when his play on the mound falters. (Fernando Calzada/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The film exists to show that Sugar is not just “that one,” though of course, there are dozens like him in the camp, and hundreds more around the DR, ballplayers being raised up like cattle, carrying the expectations of family and country. When Sugar gets the call to spring training in Arizona, the entire village comes to the send-off party. A funny, rat-a-tat montage of close-ups follows, with each face reminding Sugar what he owes them — they’re cousins, neighbours, friends of friends recalling former intimacies. Sugar is flummoxed and amused: “What’s your name again?”

Sugar is as much an immigrant story as a baseball story, two narratives that twist together in all professional sports these days. Fresh off the plane, Sugar and his fellow Dominicans get their first wide-eyed taste of American hotels and pricey mini-bars, but the Balki-esque jokes are breezy and fleeting. It turns out that Arizona is not exactly The Show; baseball at this level is mostly work, steady and modestly paid. Sugar’s cheques get smaller as he sends home money each week, the fatherless boy playing patriarch from afar, asking after his unfinished home.

Then he’s called up to a single-A affiliate, The Swing, in Bridgetown, Iowa. An elderly couple called the Higginses (Larry E. Donaldson and Barbara P. Engstrom) boards Sugar in their home (“No cervezas!”) as they do with promising players every year. They’re not cruel exactly, but it’s clear that Sugar is interchangeable with every other player who’s slept in their guestroom; how much he matters in life is contingent upon his success on the field. When he’s striking out one player after another, he’s adored and returns the adoration in kind, grinning madly at the cheering crowd, both sides of the relationship hot with the thrill of a great player on a winning strike. Even the Higginses’ upright granddaughter (Ellary Porterfield) takes notice, inviting Sugar to join her “church group,” which turns out not to be a euphemism. This leads to an uncomfortable, comedic image of the only black man in Iowa playing foosball in a church basement with a bunch of toothy white teens: how to be a missionary without leaving home.

On the other hand, there is genuine kindness in the girl, and in many others who surround Sugar at first. He leans on a fellow Dominican (Rayneil Rufino) hampered by an injury, an unnerving spectre for a young player who feels infallible. By using his only line of English — “Good game” — Sugar befriends Brad Johnson (Andre Johnson), a Stanford graduate and second baseman signed for a million dollars.

There are worlds between them: Johnson listens to TV on the Radio and talks of going to grad school for history. Sugar can barely communicate, but he watches his new friend closely. As his game falls off, Sugar grows more isolated and frustrated – just another immigrant who can’t speak English getting pummeled outside a bar for dancing with a white girl. He comes of age under the strangest circumstances, forced to ask himself: Who might I be outside of baseball? What other possible worlds might I inhabit?

A surprising twist provides some answers and a tender coda for a film that goes down into the heart of loneliness, without ever forsaking its soaring optimism.

Sugar opens in Vancouver and Toronto on April 17 and Montreal on April 24, with other Canadian cities to follow.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.