Increasingly, it seems, documentaries, or at least sports documentaries, don’t imitate life so much as they imitate B-movies.

“Through the Fire” chronicles the meteoric rise of a Coney Island schoolyard legend. The film’s promotional tag line reads: “His family gave him the dream, the streets gave him the drive.The game gave him the chance.” And happily for ESPN, which is releasing the film in New York today and in selected urban markets before its March 14 DVD release, none of that is untrue. It just seems untrue while you’re watching.

Directed by Jonathan Hock, who made IMAX’s “Michael Jordan to the Max” and who has worked on numerous shows for ESPN, most notably “Streetball,” “Through the Fire” is structured as a feature film. The central casting is perfect – Sebastian Telfair couldn’t be more charming if he were played by Cuba Gooding Jr. And it’s hard to imagine that Hollywood could come up with a better underdog scenario than Mr. Telfair’s life story.

You’re scarcely settled in your seat when Sebastian, having led Abraham Lincoln High School to its third league title and a state championship, calls a press conference to announce his choice of university: Louisville, coached by Rick Pitino. Then, just as in a movie, side stories converge on our hero.

Sebastian’s older brother, also something of a local hoops legend, fails to make the NBA draft, devastating the family.Then, as if to underline the Telfairs’ desperate straits, a drug-related shooting in their building emphasizes how desperately Mrs. Telfair and her children need to get out of the projects. In response, Sebastian opts for the NBA draft and a whopping $15 million Adidas deal. But this doesn’t end his underdog status: It merely heightens it.

Indeed, when Mr. Telfair announced in 2004 that he would be available for the draft, much of the New York press became hostile, questioning whether his size (slightly less than 6 feet and about 170 pounds) and inexperience would allow him to succeed in the NBA. In truth, these questions have yet to be answered, and it will probably take a follow-up documentary to resolve them. Now 20, Mr. Telfair is currently a role player for the Portland Trail Blazers, averaging 9.4 points in 25 minutes a game.”Right now,” he recently told the Associated Press, “I don’t know who I am. I’m definitely not Sebastian Telfair.”

But such doubts are absent from Mr. Hock’s film, which is one long, sustained cheer for the system that helped lift Sebastian and his family out of economic despair. As you might expect from a director who has worked so closely with ESPN (the network that broadcasts the high school games that first brought Mr. Telfair before a national audience), the emphasis is on the game itself, and here Mr. Hock is on steady ground. The basketball, from the energetic schoolyard pickups to the high school contests, is so lovingly recorded and the grace and spirit of the young men so evident that it exposes the over-edited basketball sequences in movies like “Glory Road” for the studio concoctions they are.

Mr. Telfair himself is clean-cut, smiling, and buoyant, and handles the press with a slickness that belies his years. No doubt he has picked up a lick of press savvy from watching his cousin, Stephon Marbury. Mr. Telfair seems like the very incarnation of what the game is supposed to be about, and Mr. Hock’s camera sticks to him so close that at times you’re almost expecting a referee to jump in and call a technical. You never question for a moment that Sebastian de serves everything he finally gets.

Nor do you question the larger issues that surround the Telfair story, unfortunately. Leaving aside the issue of whether Sebastian or his brother (who is now playing professional ball in Greece – not such a bad life, after all) would have been better off going to college, it might have been appropriate for someone in the film to address the many lives that are ruined as kids chase the carrot at the end of the stick and, unlike Messrs. Telfair and Marbury, never get to bite. A friend of mine who covered high school and college basket ball for 30 years once estimated that it takes at least 1,000 young boys, all of them competing furiously from grade school on up, to create the forge that will produce a single great talent. How many of them, dropping out of school to pursue basketball, get burned before they get through the fire?

“Through the Fire” is exhilarating to watch, but you have to wear blinders to walk away from it unconcerned with all the issues it pretends don’t exist.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”