Spoiler alert: Wait, can you spoil non-fiction? No? Good.

Today I went to see the Austin premiere of the film The Longshots, a movie about Jasmine Plummer, the first female to play in a Pop Warner football tournament in the league’s history.

The reason that I was there is because I play for a women’s full-tackle football team, the Austin Outlaws (Yes, we wear pads. Yes, we play by NFL rules. And yes, if you do not live in Austin, there is probably a women’s professional football team near you). Several of my teammates and I had been invited at the behest of the Austin Film Festival, who had arranged for the screening.

I brought my six-year-old daughter along, as she had expressed interest after seeing previews of the film, and I was curious about the opinion of a representative of the Hannah Montana set.

The screening was about half full, and contained a diverse mix of attendees. An elderly British woman sat in the very back row with her granddaughter. A former collegiate football player brought his entire family. One long-haired metal-looking fellow expounded loudly and at length on his film-going criteria.

The Longshots was directed by Fred Durst. Fred I-did-it-all-for-the-nookie Durst. Not a surprise for film festival frequent fliers maybe, as Durst premiered his debut feature, “The Education of Charlie Banks” at Tribeca; but an unsettling idea for the rest of us.

Like many sports movies, the story told by Durst is one based on a true story, and anyone with a search engine can find out how it ends. Or begins, for that matter: Jasmine Plummer, played by Keke Palmer, is a wayward youth in the sense that she is a misfit (if perhaps not in the way GeekNoir intended while writing Wanted: black female misfits for Open Salon, nonetheless a multilayered bookworm reviled by her peers), a latchkey kid in a decrepit town, and has issues because her father abandoned her family.

After school she is left under the supervision of her uncle, the hobo, because her mother has picked up an extra shift at “the diner”. They embark on an initially antagonistic relationship that yields two facts: the girl can throw a ball, and her uncle (Curtis Plummer, played by Ice Cube) sees a potential in her that no one else does.

In the course of the film, Jasmine learns how to be a quarterback, Curtis learns how to be a coach, and the whole town learns how to lift itself up by its bootstraps. If you are not a kid, a parent, a sports player, a priest, or a consumer of mind-altering pharmaceuticals, the manner in which this knowledge is attained may seem maudlin at best. Luckily, at least one of these attributes describe 90% of the American populace, and the theater I was sitting in was no exception.

From the perspective of a football player, a high point is a scene devoted to Jasmine assembling her pads for the first time. A low point is any scene in which Jasmine’s n’er-do-well father appears.

All in all, I expected much worse, so I was prepared to forgive a few over-sentimental indulgences. My teammates and I found ourselves rooting for a team that could not possibly win, a family that had not won yet, and a girl who didn’t even know what winning meant. It is not the sport but the story, not the story but the way it is told – and to tell it, Durst exhibits sensitivity and talent never explicit in his music.

After the movie was over, a couple of Film Festival staffers asked the audience members what they thought. When it was my daughter’s turn to reply, she gave a one word review: Awesome!

Take that, Hannah.