Streetballers is ostensibly about an underground illegal basketball league (insomuch as it is about anything at all), so you already know something has gone terribly wrong when the movie opens with a quote about ball-playing from Joe DiMaggio, known slightly better for his exploits on the baseball diamond than his time jumping hoops. And the quotes continue throughout the movie, every 15 minutes or so, as if the writer had accidentally gotten pages from a quote-a-day calendar caught in his script, and then just left them there. The quotes are from Albert Einstein, Tennyson, and even other sports celebrities like Vince Lombardi -- yet not one quote from a basketball player, coach, or manager.

I'm only spending so much time on this particular point because it underlines the focus problems of this first-time film from writer/producer/director/star Matthew Scott Krentz. It wants to be about basketball, brotherhood, dating, family life, sex, and everything in between, but by making trite, casual observations about each, it comes off more like the staid collection of quotes that pepper the movie.

To talk a little about the plot, or at least put it in some semblance of order, which is more than the movie attempts to do: John (Krentz) is a high school basketball player whose brother Michael (Patrick Rooney) drunkenly kills a kid (also a basketball player), and is sent to jail. Four years later, Michael is released, and at the same time, John is befriending a fellow, black basketball-playing student named Jacob (Jimmy McKinney) who needs help with his Shakespeare monologue, specifically the "band of brothers" monologue in Henry V. Because movie high schools only teach thematically relevant Shakespeare plays. But I digress.

Or rather, the movie digresses, because as Michael continues to get drunk and act racist, and Jacob sort of hangs out with some people who may have something to do with underground illegal basketball playing (oh yes), John kind of romances a supermarket clerk (Adrieanne Perez). And you'd expect these chains would all come together in some kind of climactic montage, or big game, or something. And you would be wrong.

The threads of the plot continue to dangle throughout Streetballer's bloated running time, never coalescing into anything more than a collection of things which Krentz, I'm sure, thinks are very deep and thoughtful, but mean nothing in the long run. It's really first-time filmmaker syndrome, the idea that you have one great story to tell... and then forget to tell the story, since this is your only chance to get every idea you've ever thought of onto the silver screen.

I'm ignoring the other aspects of the movie, though, like the inappropriately goofy and intrusive score, or the awkward jump cuts, poor framing, and all around general inability to keep the camera in focus. I'd be loathe not to mention those aspects, or the mumbling delivery of the actors, that ranges from over-the-top to pseudo improvisational, sometimes in the exact same scene.

It isn't all bad, though: The aforementioned Perez acquits herself admirably and charmingly in an underwritten and clichéd "quirky girlfriend" role. There are also some nice shots of the sky.

Also on the side of good, I haven't mentioned the fact that every once in a while, John plays basketball with the ghost of the kid killed in the first scene. These scenes are far more interesting, believable, engaging, and promising than anything in the other 97 percent of Streetballers' running time. A note to Mr. Krentz, and a general moviemaking rule of thumb: If you have a basketball-playing ghost in your movie, your movie should be about a basketball-playing ghost. Nothing else.



He shoots he... well, you know.