Hardball

A sports drama set in Chicago. Conor gambles and he is in debt. Running from the people he owes, he gets work through a friend: he will coach a team in a youth baseball league a company sponsors, and be paid weekly for it. The team is made up of children from the Cabrini Green housing project. At first he does not care about the job; he wants the money and out. The children do not take him seriously either. What the narrative turns on is not the games but life outside them: who can go out in the evening, who has a life orderly enough to meet the league's rules, who has to look after a younger brother. The source is Daniel Coyle's book of the same name; he followed a real team for a season and the book came out of that. Keanu Reeves plays Conor. Diane Lane plays a teacher. One of the children on the team is Michael B. Jordan, very young at the time; it is one of his first film parts. Brian Robbins directed. The ending is not soft and it breaks part of the pattern of the genre. A production that does its job for anyone who likes sports drama and city stories. Before you watch, know this: the narrative is built from the point of view of a white adult, and that choice became the most criticised thing about it.