The generic “inspirational sports film” has made a disappointing comeback in the last few years. This subgenre has a proud history of classics, like Hoosiers and Pride of the Yankees, but you wouldn’t realize it from watching such by-the-numbers efforts like Glory Road, Friday Night Lights, and Miracle. Even a modest success like Coach Carter still relies on well-worn underdog clichés and easy sentimentality. When the words “Based on the Incredible True Story” splash over the screen during a preview, you already know the type of maudlin manipulative junk to expect.

But then there’s Murderball. It isn’t based on a true story, it is the true story: an inspirational sports documentary that makes the fictionalized examples look like imitation wood siding. The sportsmen in this movie make the Green Bay Packers look like momma’s boys, and they could probably ream the Dallas Cowboys while sitting in wheelchairs. Which, appropriately, they are.

Wheelchair Rugby. You have probably never heard of it, but after watching Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry-Alex Rubin’s documentary about the men who play this unusual sport, you will never forget it. The sport doesn’t have much in common with rugby aside from the “kill the guy with the ball” concept. It actually resembles a highly athletic combination of team handball, tackle football, and bumper cars. The players are quadriplegics who use specialized wheelchairs designed to take maximum punishment and play on a wooden playing field (usually a standard basketball court). Yes, did read that last sentence correctly: these players are quadriplegics. As one of the interview subjects explains early in the documentary, quadriplegics don’t necessarily have complete loss of the use of all their limbs; it means they have impairment in all four limbs due to spinal chord damage. Some of the players have full arm function, but limited hand functions, while others have better use of one arm than the other. One of the subjects, Bob Lujano, is an amputee missing most of his forearms and both his legs (the result of a rare blood disease in childhood), but the majority of the players still have partially functioning upper limbs. Each player has a point rating based on how much movement he has, from 1 to 3.5, and a team can field a only limited number of points at a time to create balance. Sticky resin on their gloves and specially designed prosthetics help them with catching the ball and driving their invincible aluminum chariots.

Any sense of pity you might have for the players vanishes only minutes into the film. These men are ferocious athletes who use, as one of them phrases it, “everything available to them.” They have forged lives for themselves in the wake of accidents that could have removed them entirely from society. They have lives remarkably similar to our own, with only one difference: they are sitting down.

The spine of the film is the competition between the U.S. and Canadian Quad Rugby teams on their road to the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, a massive sporting event held as a “parallel” games to the Olympics. The rivalry between the two teams goes deeper than sporting competition: the head coach of the Canadian team, Joe Soares, once played for the U.S. and tried to sue the team when they eventually cut him. To the U.S. players, Soares is a “traitor” (player Mark Zupan bluntly puts it that if Joe were burning on the side of the road, he wouldn’t piss on him to put him out), while Soares sees himself as someone unfairly treated who only wants to keep coaching and keep playing…and if that means he has to coach for Canada, than so be it. The games between these two teams are furious battles of colliding metal, with superb camera work that sometimes sits the viewer right under the specialized chairs as they swing across the playing field.

However, Murderball spends quality time off the court with the players, their families, and friends in order to give the viewer a broad view of the life of a paraplegic. Through Keith Cavill, a recently disabled young motorcross racer, we watch the frustrating process of first dealing with the loss of mobility and the mental hardship that comes with it. Cavill’s scenes make for an intriguing contrast with the seasoned players, who have all had years (and in Soares’s case, decades) of adjustment into their new lives. Cavill’s first discovery of wheelchair rugby has a tremendous effect on him: he brightens up like a whole new person (even as his therapist tells him he isn’t allowed to fly around the hospital and ram into things), a man seeing the possibilities he thought he would never have again after his accident. In this moment resides the great power of the whole film: the realization of human potential, no matter the limitations.

Other sequences explore the more mundane aspects of the life of a quadriplegic, including answering in humorous fashion the question they hear the most often: “So can you, still, you know…do it?” And yes, apparently the wheelchair can be used to get girls!

But the most poignant drama in the film comes from the lives of its two key figures: Mark Zupan, Team U.S.A.’s top player, and Joe Soares. Zupan’s spinal injury occurred when he was eighteen. He passed out in the back of his friend’s pick-up, and then went flying out of it when his friend drove off without knowing he was in the back and got in a terrible accident. The film shows the reconciliation between Zupan and the man responsible, Chris Igoe; the event is far more difficult for Chris than for Mark. The irony here is that the supposedly disabled man turns out to be far more able, far more adjusted to life, than his uninjured friend. Joe Soares, who initially appears as the film’s “villain,” emerges as its most fascinating personality. Born into a poor Portuguese family and disabled from childhood because of polio, Joe is driven to succeed at almost any cost. The cost is sometimes heavy. The film highlights Joe’s edgy relationship with his young son Robert, a non-athletic but intelligent and musically talented young boy.

At the conclusion of Murderball, I found myself left with a feeling that I could not have possibly anticipated. I envied these men. Instead of feelings of pity or relative admiration, I almost wanted the life that they have. These people, who lack simple functions we take for granted, have achieved more than most have ever dreamed of. That’s true inspiration…better than any fictional version I’ve seen in years.

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