The true story of Murderball was just crying out for your standard two-handkerchief triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity treatment. But the partnership of writer and co-director/-producer Dana Adam Shapiro, photographer and co-director Henry-Alex Rubin, and co-producer Jeffrey Mandel, has risen above temptation. In an excellent lesson for documentarians and fabulists alike, they show -- rather than narrate -- their tale in eighty-six minutes, make the point and know when to get out.

Its title explained and appropriate, not the commercial ploy it otherwise might appear, Murderball is the beneficiary of the character of its characters, of the unique way in which they and their setting are recorded, and of the built-in double level that elevates this above sports as metaphor or agony-and-ecstasy fare.

Contrary to misconception, depending on the nature and location of spinal injury, quadriplegics have varying degrees of impairment and movement in all four limbs and can, and do, engage in a broad range of physical activities. This includes sex, which, along with sports competition, is important because many of those so disabled are young. The subjects here are male, crippled by vehicular accidents or disease, although near the end they address the returning phenomenon of similarly challenged GIs, an aspect sensitively fictionalized in The Best Years of Our Lives, The Men and “based-on” Born on the Fourth of July, while clichéd as Coming Home and confectionary Forrest Gump.

The participants are largely components of Team USA and Team Canada, fiery rivals between the 2002 Wheelchair Rugby World Championships in Sweden and the Athens 2004 Paralympics (careful! not Special Olympics). As physical as any, quad rugby is played in open but heavy, reinforced wheelchairs, without helmets -- “at worst, I’d break my neck again” -- in a full-contact amalgam of hockey, basketball, American football and team handball. Without excess of fashionable trash talking, but with plenty of adrenaline, screaming and high-voltage “loud-and-proud” pep talks, players, coaches and officials are physically as well as mentally tough, neither asking nor giving quarter among themselves, loved ones or those non-impaired who condescend to them.

Watching from “my ass level view” at wheelchair height, as opposed to documentaries’ habitual overview, the audience is “in” the action with the feel of fiction movies. And it is drawn by the range of personalities, different from one another, demanding of others but of no one more than of themselves. Its primary focus on some selected few of the participants, the film reveals the competitiveness of human nature, not the anger or self-pity one expects beforehand. Among these few there is particularly the personal “Frazier vs. Ali” animosity between tattooed devil-red-goateed US superstar Mark Zupan and Peter Boyle-lookalike Joe Soares, Canada’s coach following his being cut -- unfairly, he claims -- by Team USA.

Whatever the reason -- it has been suggested that years of rehab stripped them of false vanity -- these men are unselfconsciously frank with the camera and with us the audience. Alongside this level, however, and beyond parents, wives and girlfriends, there is consideration of other complicated relationships: driven Great Santini-disciplinarian Soares’ with intellectually inclined fourteen-year-old son Robert, and Zupan’s with Christopher Igoe, the bosom high school friend who, unknowing and drunk, was at the wheel when the life-altering accident occurred.

With laudable dramatic, i.e., non-narrated, density, Murderball does not revert to easy home-movie footage but shows what these men have overcome, in the parallel yet separate story of young Keith Cavill, a recent “quad” who goes through rehabilitation, returns home and is difficult, insists on looking at his fatal dirt bike and helmet, and, perhaps a future star in his own right, is inspired by seeing and testing out a quad rugby wheelchair.

We, too, are inspired, but not in the saccharine sense that, thank goodness, this film is smart enough to avoid. 

(Released by ThinkFilm Inc. and rated "R" for language and sexual content.)