Although a tad slow out of the batter’s box, this doc from exec producers the Farrelly Brothers eventually comes together as the memorable—and moving—story of baseball’s Luis Tiant. In fact, it’s not only the pacing that may try your patience in the early going. By not providing context upfront, The Lost Son of Havana presumes the audience’s familiarity with the former Yankee, Twin, Indian and, most famously, Red Sox hurler. A victim of a 1960’s Castro edict that prohibited U.S.-residing athletes from returning to their homeland after “selling out” and betraying the glorious tradition of Cuban baseball, Tiant has tried more than once over the years to visit the friends and family he left behind.

Part of the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, The Lost Son of Havana is directed by Jonathan Hock in a subdued, respectful manner as it chronicles Tiant’s arrival on Cuban soil for the first time in 46 years. But without a prior sense of Tiant’s celebrity and accomplishments in the U.S., viewers may wonder why they’re bothering to follow a quiet, white-bearded, cigar-smoking gentleman as he putters around first suburban Florida and then the back streets of Havana. Indeed, the doc initially comes across as a low-energy tribute to a colorful personality whom we never actually glimpse being colorful or even particularly engaging on camera. At times I found myself questioning whether Tiant was entirely comfortable with being the subject of a doc, viewing it instead as the price he had to pay to finagle his way back to the land where he was born (he’s supposedly coaching a team made up of the film crew). After watching the rest of the film, though, which both remorselessly and remorsefully suggests the full weight of the past—Cuba’s and Tiant’s—it’s possible to reach a wholly different conclusion: what we witness in the first half of The Lost Son of Havana is a man burdened by memories and muted by emotion.

Of course if you’re aware of the unique pitching style that Tiant developed, well versed in his 1975 World Series exploits and so forth, you may be captivated from square one. In any case, the film’s bold gambit to wait a while before intercutting the present-tense storyline with historical footage and commentary ultimately pays off in spades, as its accumulated power ends up hitting like a ton of bricks. Reminiscences from the likes of Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk and, most impressively, from Peter Gammons, fill the gaps in chronology as they alternate with the increasingly elegiac segments that see Tiant reunited with figures from his long-ago youth. The juxtaposition of his glory days with the moments that he spends, for example, with his aging aunts, makes them all the more poignant. As Tiant touchingly provides them and others with consumer goods not available in Cuba, it’s clear that while they have enjoyed his triumphs across vast distances of both geography and time, his inability to share his life with them directly has rendered many of his accomplishments bittersweet.   

Its occasional tearjerking scenes notwithstanding, The Lost Son of Havana is really a baseball lover’s movie par excellence. And that’s not just because of the way it details life in the majors from the ‘60s through the early ‘80s, but also because we’re given an intimate look at baseball inside Cuba and in the Negro Leagues as well: Tiant’s father, Luis Tiant, Sr., was a pitcher who played in the latter during the years before Jackie Robinson helped integrate MLB. Hock shows that the elder Tiant was more than a formidable player in his own right—his skill may even have exceeded his son's in some respects (he did strike out Babe Ruth after all). Actually, that’s not a terribly interesting debate, given the deeper emotional currents the film explores. Watching vintage clips of Tiant, Sr., throwing out the first ball at his son’s World Series game is enough to give anyone the chills. Yes, some portions of this storyline may be old news to diehard baseball fans, but I grew up in ‘70s and, perhaps because I rooted for the Yankees, the import and scope of what Tiant stood for was totally lost on me... a situation that The Lost Son of Havana corrects spectacularly. Indeed, it's hard not to feel that over the course of its runtime everyone who watches it becomes an honorary Sox fan.  

Thoughtfully produced down to its wonderful score and its Chris Cooper narration, The Lost Son of Havana is the kind of well-executed high-interest doc that will eventually makes its way to both television and DVD. But if in the meantime it gets distribution that brings it to your hometown, you’ll want to catch it. It’s a sport movie for non-sports nuts, and it’s a movie about history and politics that speaks to those topics even as it bypasses them. Above all, The Lost Son of Havana is about family, loyalty, and character traits such as perseverence and resolve—things that don't simply endure, but, as the film makes clear, deserve to.