The result is not a lifelong bond or loving buddies a la Rory O'shea Was Here. As you watch the former best friend revisit the site of the accident, there are no epiphanies or there is no sudden eloquence. There's just pain and guilt.

In another sequence, the guys play a joke on an able bodied person by stuffing one of their teammates into a box and tricking her into lifting it. In between they drink beer, talk about getting hard-ons, and work on daily routines like putting on shoes or feeding themselves that they once took for granted.

That anger over their lost physicality takes form in their chosen sport. These guys don't get off on writing poetry or being Steven Hawking, they express themselves by crashing into one another in armored wheelchairs. Where most disability movies celebrate the spirit transcending even not needing the mundanity of the physical body, Murderball makes the case for the opposite.

These guys are celebrating the fact that they still have bodies. They enjoy getting sweaty, wrestling with one another, and competing. One of the best moments in the film comes when one of the guys tells the story about someone congratulating him for being in the Special Olympics. He responds by saying, "Nothing against the mentally disabled, but the Special Olympics are about honoring mere participation, this is about winning. We're real athletes and competitors."

To them, an essential part of being alive is still having the body outside the sea inside.

Midway through the movie, the players talk about still being, um, "players," and the ways that being in a wheelchair can serve as a surprising chick magnet. One subtext of the movie is that all of the guys are shown to have perfectly happy dating or married lives, though only one winds up with a woman who also has a disability. In fact, part-way through, I began wondering if there were female murderballers out there. Where Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom have deeply feminine sensibilities in which boys and girls compete together and against one another, Murderball is pure testosterone.

Ultimately, it's a movie with two strong subtexts: masculinity and America. If you just had the soundtrack, you would be virtually certain that this was a gladiator picture or a football game. Murderball is an unrepentant celebration of male expression of men who respond to having their masculinity and adequacy challenged at the most fundamental level. In turn, it is also a meditation about what it means to be an American male.

The frame of the movie is the U.S.'s fall from dominance in the sport. Joe Soares, the player who sought revenge against age by coaching the Canadian team, gives a moving speech about what it means to be a disabled American. As a Portugese immigrant, he discusses what his life might have been in another country and praises the United States for being the place where he got to make a "whole" life for himself rather than being hidden in a closet or being considered a symbol of familial imperfection or feebleness.