The "self-hating"--and really, really great-- documentarians Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro (Photos: ThinkFilm)

Early in the process of shooting their brilliant new documentary Murderball, filmmakers Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin had either the insight or the good fortune to decode a primary challenge:

Their genre bored them.

"We started off the film with two stigmas," Rubin told The Reeler during a recent visit to New York. "It's a documentary and it's a movie about disabled people. And nobody wants to see documentaries, really, or movies about disabled people. But they might see a really engrossing film that looks like a (narrative film)—not a documentary—about guys in crazy wheelchairs smashing into each other. With music by Ministry."

"We're self-hating documentarians," Shapiro followed, nodding.

The irony is more muted than you might think. Opening Friday, Murderball is indeed the story of the United States quadriplegic rugby team: a dozen of the world's most feared (and fearless) athletes who must battle their Canadian arch-nemeses in retrofitted wheelchairs for rugby supremacy. Between contests, the players are regular guys who contend with injury, relationships and the everyday misconceptions of "able-bodies" who mistake them for invalids.

It could have been a syrup-stoked succession of talking heads interlaced with game footage. Instead, Shapiro and Rubin have fashioned one of the best films of the year—a dramatic, kinetic joyride into the heart of America's love affair with competition. Their subjects boast, brag, talk shit, play pranks and nurture their championship ambition as vigorously as any pro athletes from whom sports fans take inspiration.

"We wanted the film to reflect the attitudes of the players," Rubin said. "So we started having fun with the camera and we started giving the aesthetic a little more of a 'fuck-you' attitude than your average documentary. The average documentary shoots everything very conventionally and very wide or (with medium shots). It actually does take a certain amount of subjectivity—and courage, I would add—to know where to zoom and what to look at. And also, to reflect what Dana and I were feeling at the moment."

And yet the filmmakers portray an equally acute vulnerability that has less to do with wheelchairs than the prospect that as easily as these guys might win, they might lose. And by the end of the film, riven with emotion, the viewer must wonder: For a group of athletes who have come this far, is any game really just a game?

Attempting to answer the question here would undermine Murderball's tightly woven drama (not to mention spoil all your fun). But it is a question the directors visited and revisited during the two-plus years they tracked the players, coaches and the friends and family who work rationalize their obsessions.

Murderball's poster boy (and resident bad-ass) Mark Zupan

"They got it," said team captain Mark Zupan of the filmmakers. "They really did. They asked the questions and they learned. We got to educate them and they got to educate us."

Zupan is Murderball's unofficial star. The filmmakers intimately profile the trajectories of his relationships with his girlfriend Jess, Canadian coach (and former American star) Joe Soares and his old high school friend Christopher Igoe, from whose truck Zupan was thrown in the automobile accident that paralyzed him. He is charged with defining quadriplegia for a largely unknowing audience, who learn the condition applies to people with varying degrees of paralysis in all four limbs.

He is also a brash competitor, but even more modest; he is far more impressed that the film debunks stereotypes and myths than he is that it catapults him from real life (changing his clothes in the film's opening sequence) to larger-than-life (the charging player on the Murderball poster). "As long as it changes the misconceptions of people in chairs, I couldn't give a shit what it does to me," Zupan said. "Come up to me. Ask me a question. Say hi. I'm normal, just like any one of you."

Joe Soares agrees. A former world champion quad rugby player with the American team, Soares earned his countrymen's enmity when he signed on to coach Team Canada in 2002. His team's stunning early victory provides the momentum leading up to the team's climactic showdown in the 2004 Athens Paralympics.

Soares said he doesn't mind viewers perceiving him as Murderball's antagonist, although he is quick to state that he was just one guy hired to do a job. "I've had my time," he elaborated. "This is about my team. When they came to me with the cameras, honestly, I didn't want any part of it early on. So they said, you know, you're right in the middle of this. This is a great story."

Soares added that it was no secret he wanted to beat the United States, even as he kept a conservative home in Tampa Bay. And though he bristles some at what he calls a "misrepresented" portrayal of his relationship with his 13-year-old son, he says the film was totally accurate in its depiction of his fracture with Zupan and his American counterparts.

"We got lucky with Joe and Zupan because they hate each other," Rubin said. "It was like Frazier-Ali. So we knew it was perfect. Every sports movie needs a rivalry, so we just followed them."

But like the mythos of Frazier-Ali transcends sports culture, so does Murderball exceed its framework as a "sports movie." The film reduces its complex characters and construction to a basic quest its viewers instinctively (and powerfully) relate to; the climactic match between Canada and the United States showcases the players' families and fans as much as it showcases the game. In its craftsmanlike way, Murderball's denouement interweaves the hope, fear, triumph and anguish that preceded it; it says that our tradition might tell us that how we play the game is what matters, but admits winning and losing are the only ways we could ever be able to quantify that standard.

As obviously appealing as it sounds to you or me, fewer and fewer mainstream films—narrative or documentary—have the balls to pursue this basic angle for better or worse; audiences are expected to smile as they are force-fed the hoary, hollow melodrama of Cinderella Man (for free, granted) or Seabiscuit. I mean, Jesus Christ—when Shapiro, Rubin and their producing partner Jeffrey Mandel pick up their Best Documentary Oscars next spring, they won't be just the guys who made "that sports movie" or "that cripple movie." They will have taken their audience somewhere major studios were too aloof to seek out, whose discovery required little more than the patience to let the story unfold naturally—to let the lessons teach themselves.

In other words, if the makers of such an amazing documentary can beat their aversion to documentaries, and world-champion quad rugby players can beat the odds, maybe Hollywood is not far behind? Oh, who am I kidding? I can live with two out of three.