Jaquan in Wrestle (Oscilloscope Pictures)

 Wrestle centers on four teens who are on the same high school wrestling team in an impoverished, largely African-American section of Huntsville, Alabama. A quick look around their campus reveals an unkempt football field and practically non-existent indoor basketball court, which don’t bode well for any kind of athletics program. But what the students do have is a no-nonsense coach, Chris Scribner, who promises that if they buy into what he’s selling, put in the hard work and dedication, they have a legitimate shot at college scholarships.

Whether the coach can keep his athletes walking on the straight and narrow amid all the distractions in their lives is the big question. From the start, he and directors Suzannah Herbert and Lauren Belfer map out the path to the 2015–16 state wrestling championships, which take place in 15 weeks and will be crawling with university scouts. It looks tenuous: in order to qualify, students must end the season among the top eight wrestlers statewide for their respective weight class. Each of the film’s subjects starts off near the bottom of the rankings, and his standing fluctuates with every win and loss.

Most of the kids are struggling in school; that is, when they even attend. Along with pushing them to study harder, Scribner becomes increasingly involved in their home environments, where they are mostly raised by exhausted single mothers. It’s also clear that some of the youths have emotional problems: Jamario, for example, frequently suffers from panic attacks that derail his confidence. In addition, the main drama at his house concerns tensions between his family and his girlfriend, Samara, who in a big early twist, turns out to be white.

Jaquan, who is Jamario’s best friend, also flashes athletic potential, although he has his own issues with self-discipline. Despite needing to get his weight down, he keeps eating junk food. Then there is Teague, the only white teammate, who claims wrestling is all he has ever wanted to do, but unfortunately, he has gotten so deeply involved with drugs that his own mother thinks he will end up in jail. The most hopeful prospect, Jailen, is both a star athlete and strong academically. However, he is more sensitive than his peers, and at one point, a run-in with a racist white police officer shakes his confidence.

It’s compelling to watch how the youths’ personal lives dovetail with their performances on the mat. Besides the wrestling scenes, which are sparingly edited and capture the visceral excitement of the matches as they happened, the documentary is at its most memorable when Scribner is showing tough love. In one darkly humorous sequence, he forces Jaquan to exercise all night in order to lose five pounds or else he won’t make weight. (It’s similar to a scene in Bennett Miller’s 2014 wrestling-themed drama Foxcatcher, although Herbert and Belfer capture an important and highly gross detail Miller missed). But Scribner also reveals a softer side during scenes where he tries to boost Jamario’s confidence.

At times the coach, who is a white Yankee, veers close to becoming a white savior stand-in, but to his credit, he is self-aware enough to know that his own experiences as a youth were profoundly different from his athletes’, and he doesn’t ever try to be one of them. At his best, he is a friendly intermediary between the kids and their mothers, helping to explain what the former need from the latter. There are also hints that for Scribner, the wrestling program is as much about saving his own life as the kids’. In a particularly candid moment, he touches on years of substance abuse problems from his own past and how he received one chance after another to go straight but repeatedly failed to do so.

Overall, Wrestle is an empathic portrait of what it is like to grow up poor in the Deep South. The film spends time getting to know each of the four young men, who despite the difficulties they face in their arduous climb to adulthood, are brimming with vitality. That is especially true for Jailen, who really starts to blossom as a potential scholar. Although institutional racism constantly affects the African-American wrestlers, who are on more than one occasion targeted by police, the teammates are colorblind toward each other.

But this is, above all, a sports movie, with the mat ultimately serving as the place for emotional catharsis to occur. It is here that the protagonists either face down their demons and emerge triumphant, or succumb to them. It’s legitimately suspenseful, but even for those who are not well-acquainted with the sport, Herbert and Belfer make it accessible throughout with an onscreen alert that flashes whenever the play stops, accompanied by information on what just happened. Meanwhile, an update after each match states where all four competitors stand in the state rankings, which in turn, tells us how important the next bout is.

With the way in which it balances athletics and its subjects’ personal lives, Wrestle deserves to stand alongside the best films about youth who pursue sports for a shot at a better life, most notably Steve James’s incredible Hoop Dreams (1994). Its ending involves a high school graduation ceremony and then a sobering denouement, which reminds us of the stark reality of life in a place like Huntsville and how opportunity, like one’s high school wrestling days, must be seized when possible.

Directed by Suzannah Herbert and Lauren Belfer
Written by Belfer, Herbert, and Pablo Proenza
Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories
USA. 96 min. Not rated