Friday Night Might

Undefeated

*** out of ****

Directed by: Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin

Running time: 110 minutes

A run-down, close-knit suburb in the Southern U.S. pins its hopes on a football team. If that synopsis reminds you of Friday Night Lights in all of its forms, from book to television series, you may be delighted to find that Undefeated, the recent Oscar winner for best documentary, covers similar yardage.

The film takes place at Manassas, a nearly all black high school in the outskirts of Memphis. Although the school is shiny and refurbished, the surrounding neighbourhood is full of crumbling homes, deserted after the area’s Firestone factory shut down.

The players on the Manassas Tigers football team have been a sorry bunch. Seasons have gone by without a win, and they have never scored a playoff victory either. In 2009, however, a team that used to go seasons without a win finally started to hit a streak.

Among the seniors the film follows include O.C. Brown, a humongous offensive tackle that became a college prospect after YouTube clips showing his rough beatdown tackles gained traction online. He gets handfuls of mail a day by schools offering him scholarships. Those mean nothing if he cannot raise his marks, though.

Meanwhile, Chavis Daniels is an impressive player on the field but a firecracker of insensitive slurring and searing anger off it. He spent time in a penitentiary but his harsh attitude returns as soon as practice starts.

Then there is Bill Courtney, the coach that balances sympathy with strict authority. When Courtney, a burly ex-car salesman, joined as volunteer coach six years prior, the school could not afford a decent athletics program. To make money, the school traveled to the state’s most elite schools to face their teams. Their opponents pummeled them, but the fees given to Manassas sent them packing with enough to run their program.

A stickler for character and discipline among his players, Courtney brings a passionate delivery and ruthless attitude to his post at the school. His revealingly candid halftime speeches expose a gut-wrenching testament to his team. Courtney sadly laments how he has forged stronger bonds and spent more time in recent years with the players than his own children.

Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin fortuitously captured the team cruising to their best-ever season. (Don’t worry: the title is about as much of a spoiler alert as it was for a 2011 documentary about Sarah Palin.) With crisp handheld cameras, the duo captures revealing, candid moments between the players and their coach.

They film the most gut-wrenching subject matter without edits, grasping the most gripping footage as it unfolds. Meanwhile, for such a low-budget doc, the football games are filmed with surprising versatility. The images are clear, the movement is flexible and the tension sometimes becomes impalpable.

Unlike the Friday Night Lights series, which ran for 76 episodes, the film has less than two hours to invest its audience inside the plight of a determined, disciplined group of fighters. What Undefeated lacks in depth, it makes up for with sheer poignancy and inspiration.