PLAY BALL!
For one gay baseball team, friendship hits a home run.

THE BROKEN HEARTS CLUB
With Timothy Olyphant, Dean Cain, John Mahoney
Written and directed by Greg Berlanti

THE YOUNG GAY MEN who play softball together on a somewhat athletically challenged Los Angeles team called the Broken Hearts are in various states of attachment (and detachment) when we meet them at the beginning of The Broken Hearts Club, Greg Berlanti's amiable little dramedy about the thing that matters most in life.

That thing would be love, of course, although not just the love of the person you wake up with every morning. For as Dennis - who works as a waiter, but who has a darkroom in his home where he works on developing his dream - tells us right off: "I don’t remember when I first knew I was gay, but I do remember when I first knew it was okay to be gay." The revelation happened for Dennis (Timothy Olyphant) when he met his current circle of friends, who may not be the happiest lot, but who certainly know how to stand by each other when adversity crashes their party.

Hunky Cole (Dean Cain) is a sexually ravenous actor who breaks up with his boyfriends of a fortnight (or less) with lines from an audition speech that he writes on the palm of his hand. Funky Benji (Zach Broff) has bottle-blond hair and a bicep tattoo. Sardonic Howie (Matt McGrath) wages an on-again, off-again relationship with a great guy to whom he can't seem to commit. Plain Patrick (Ben Weber) likes to burst everyone's romantic bubble because he's an Average Joe surrounded by beauty (i.e. his friends). And newbie Kevin (Andrew Keegan), 23 and still not sure what to call himself, bristles when he meets the gay-obsessed gang but later comes to see what they stand for.

They're all held together by Jack (John Mahoney of Frasier), a retired Broadway actor who now runs a popular eatery in Boys Town (i.e. West Hollywood). He sponsors their softball team, employs most of them in his restaurant, feeds them well, wears Hawaiian shirts, and quotes Shakespeare every chance he gets. He's also in a very long-time relationship with a quiet fellow the youngsters all call Purple Guy (because of his attire).

What happens to them in the course of The Broken Hearts Club is a lot like what happens to the gay men in Love! Valour! Compassion! (sans AIDS) or the straight kids in St. Elmo's Fire (to which Berlanti's characters make self-conscious reference). So don't go to this movie looking for a story you haven't seen before because, gay or straight, there aren't any left to tell - at least of this ilk.

Instead, you should go to The Broken Hearts Club to smile and cry, to watch some comfortable acting, and to listen to Berlanti's smart writing, which turns a nice phrase in virtually every scene. Of course, the guys spend plenty of time talking about sex and men, with ample time given to why they need to talk so much about sex and men. (Wise old Jack urges them to think about the other things they are.) The self-effacing Patrick sums up that aspect of his culture best when he says: "Gay men are a bunch of 10s looking for an 11. On a good night and if he's drunk enough, I'm a 6."

To move his story along - we spend about a year in the lives of the characters - Berlanti uses lots of sprightly-cum-romantic musical interlude that seem to fill time a bit cheaply; his closing titles roll by to a cover of a tune by Karen Carpenter, who's one of Dennis' faves, and thus his most prominent OGT (obviously gay trait). And in his many scenes set outdoors, Berlanti captures the ubiquitous, almost illusory California sunshine in such a way that tells you everything will work out just fine for his buoyant romantics.

So as Dennis comes to terms with his more mature gay self, and as Kevin comes to terms with being out and gay, and as Patrick decides whether to donate sperm to his lesbian sister so she can have a baby with her snarky girlfriend, the boys-to-men teammates of the semi-hapless Broken Hearts do all they can to keep us teary-eyed and entertained. With that goal in mind, they easily hit a triple, or maybe even an inside-the-park home run.