'Off the Black' (2006) - James Ponsoldt.

'Off the Black' (2006) is a delightfully intimate and splendidly nuanced drama with a bravura, big-hearted performance from legendary, big-screen tough guy, Nick Nolte playing Ray Cook, a grizzled, beer-soaked, high school baseball umpire, idling away his ethanol-fuzzed final years in an increasingly incapacitating solitude.  After making an apparently controversial call on the baseball field, Cooke soon finds himself closely drawn to small town misfit, Dave Tibbel (Terence Morgan) a young, somewhat withdrawn, melancholy teen-aged ball player and their seemingly incongruent natures belie a great sympathy for one another. Debut writer/director, James Ponsoldt's remarkably assured, sensitively sketched film is a remarkably assured work and the arch narrative conceit of Ray asking the initially disconcerted Dave to accompany him to his 40th anniversary high school reunion as his son being adroitly handled, and the waxing of their deepening friendship is both tangible and entirely wonderful to behold. Along with Nolte's earnest and heroically heartfelt performance, the extremely experienced Thespians, Sally Kirkland and Timothy Hutton deliver subtle, no less impactful performances, especially from Hutton as Dave's profoundly depressed, emotionally muted father. 'Off the Black' is divinely stirring stuff indeed and the insightful script and subtle, refined performances from a gamely committed cast lend tremendous verisimilitude to filmmaker, Ponsoldt's irresistibly sweet-natured, blissfully unsentimental, wholly life-affirming film. I must also celebrate neophyte director's sublime use of Syd Barrett's fragile 'Love You' over the opening driving sequence as being a truly inspired choice of music!