About the famous football game in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Martin Scorsese has said, “I’m not a sports fan or a person who understands sports, but that’s the only football game I ever understood.”

Viewers without much affinity for baseball may or may not come away from Carson Lund’s Eephus understanding the technicalities of the game itself any better, but others will doubtless be able to understand the sport’s significance for those who love it. The baseball game at its center is a long one—baseball is, of course, unique in how long the games can last. This one lasts a full day, longer than some of the players are willing or able to stick with it, on a baseball field where two recreational teams have been playing for years. The field is soon to disappear; construction is set to begin there the next day. A school will stand where the baseball field once did.

Lund has stated that he was inspired by the great tradition of “hangout” films, and viewers could be forgiven for thinking early on that they are about to watch something like Dazed and Confused or American Graffiti. A vanished world (the 1990s, specifically) is evoked quickly through a radio voice-over (by none other than documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman).

The first to show up, Franny (Cliff Blake), seems like an odd duck: He sets up a folding chair, takes out a notebook with which to keep score of the game, and makes an announcement, audible only to himself, in which he pretends that his voice is echoing throughout the field. When the players arrive, they give each other some tough love and shout some familiar nicknames. They all contrast one another wildly in terms of build and appearance. It may seem that we are about to be introduced to sharply etched, quirky characters whom we will slowly get to know and perhaps watch get into high jinks.

However, Eephus is not that kind of film. One thing that distinguishes Lund’s approach, even from Altman’s, is not only his focus on a group rather than a central character but his fascination with the surface of his chosen group’s behavior rather than an attempt to dig beneath it. We rarely stay with any one person for long, and though the occasional detail is dropped about someone’s outside life, the behavior within the game is what matters to Lund. So, the men variously play, argue, grumble, stumble, or are forced to leave before the game is up. (A taciturn pitcher has forgotten his niece’s christening.) One somewhat consistent sentiment is the anger that the field will no longer be present, but there are just as many who seem to think that they’re too old to fit recreational baseball into their lives anymore.

This is tricky territory and could easily slide into sentimentality. There is occasionally an overly obvious metaphor in the dialogue, and sometimes the film seems to want us to get to know the characters better than it actually allows us to. Yet, for the most part, Eephus is an unlikely success, one that illuminates the meaning of a place and the passage of time with subtlety and poignancy. Its chief strength is Lund’s ability to keep all of its elements from being in perfect harmony. The two teams are often messing up the game, abandoning it, calling one another out for how it is being played, or making it clear that they are on different pages as to whether or not they should keep playing at all.

The camera rarely stays still, and the soundscape accommodates the game as well as the intrusion of radios, a church bell, and the never-silent natural world. Events that would be triumphant (the release of fireworks, for instance) often occur offscreen and are observed by the players rather than seen by the viewer. All of this creates an overall sense that the outside world will not stay still. The action is so strictly confined to the game that a few numinous moments, when the field is observed alone, have a unique impact.

This won’t be for everyone, probably not even for every baseball fan, yet more than a few viewers will leave Eephus convinced that Carson Lund has accomplished something special.