With the wind of a recent Oscar win for Best Documentary Feature at its back, Undefeated heads out into the woolly wilderness of a wide theatrical release this weekend. Born from a magazine article about college football recruiting, the documentary is a culmination of over 500 hours of film footage that chronicles three underprivileged student athletes from inner-city Memphis and the volunteer coach trying to help them surmount the odds both on and off the field.

Easy comparisons are to 2008’s wildly popular The Blind Side, another Memphis-based sports-themed movie, and still others dub it the Hoop Dreams of football. But Undefeated is less about sport or athletes than it is about a coach and the deep compassionate commitment he has for his players as human beings.  All comparisons aside, Undefeated should not go unwatched, as it is an inspirational alternative that gets its lift from the human side of sport. The side many “sports” films fail to capture.

Lumber mill owner Bill Courtney moonlights on a volunteer basis as the coach of the Manassas Tigers, a high school football team in North Memphis, a down-trodden area of the city that saw its better days before the Firestone tire factory closed down years ago. Only one thing remains in worse shape than the city however, and it’s the school’s football team that hasn’t won a single playoff game ever in a history dating back to 1895. With numerous 0-fer seasons in its recent past, the underfunded, understaffed football program had resorted to raising money by playing “pay games” in which rival teams paid for the opportunity to hone their skills while pummelling the Tigers.

But Coach Courtney -- either a suffering optimist or an incautious oracle -- recognizes potential in a core group of athletes who have been playing together since the eighth grade. He strongly believes the team has a real shot at winning its first playoff game. And if Coach Courtney can just get them to play better football, maybe he can teach them a few things about life as well. “Football doesn’t build character,” Courtney preaches to mostly blank stares. “It reveals character.”

It won’t be easy though, as a host of seemingly insurmountable challenges stand in the way of the coach and his dream of not just winning, but more importantly, getting his players to think as a team. Bearing the stigma of being fatherless -- his father abandoned the family when he was just four years-old -- Courtney identifies with the Manassas kids, but also carries the burden of knowing the minutes he’s spent with them have kept him away from his own children.

Despite numerous compelling personalities at Manassas High, filmmakers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin narrow their focus to three individual athletes. First there’s college prospect O.C., a monster on the gridiron, but a gentle giant off the field. Because his natural football skills unfortunately aren’t matched by his scholastic achievements, he moves in with the family of one of the team’s coaches where he can receive concentrated tutoring. Though differences abound, this is certainly where the film’s ridiculous comparisons to The Blind Side come from.

Second, we meet Montrail “Money” Brown one of the film’s most likeable personalities and the one we see with the biggest chance at achieving success. We first meet Money as he’s introducing us to his pet turtle he keeps in a washtub in the backyard. The hard-working honors student profoundly describes the turtle as being like a human, with a hard outer shell that protects its soft insides.

Finally, there’s Chavis Daniels, a senior linebacker with a hair-trigger temper. We meet him soon after -- as he’s released from a youth penitentiary. It’s not long before Chavis earns a team suspension for fighting and becomes the student of Coach Courtney’s mantra about the team being bigger than any one player. The coach works hard with Chavis to keep the youngster from spiralling out of control.

Undefeated raises numerous questions it refuses to answer. There’s certainly a place for the types of “documentary” films Michael Moore makes, but that’s not what Lindsay and Martin do here. Instead theirs is an intimate, fly-on-the-wall expose that reveals fully-realized representations of the individuals featured in the story -- something you don’t get in many of today’s films. As much as it is the documentation of an historic football accomplishment for one particular high school, it is also an inspirational film about human character and the passage from youth to manhood.

(Released by The Weinstein Company and rated "PG-13" for some language.)

Review also posted at www.franksreelreviews.com.