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"The radical middle" has always been Shelton's existential sweet spot. As an English major at an evangelical school (Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif.) during the '60s, he would protest the Vietnam War yet defend as well as play competitive sports -- which to some leftists were the roots of American aggression. As a minor league baseball player (he was with the Baltimore Orioles organization for five years), he'd risk the ire of unsophisticated teammates when he dragged them off to see incendiary films like Brian De Palma's "Hi, Mom!" As a moviemaker, he's too "quirky" or "arty" for the Hollywood establishment, and too commercial (or maybe just too entertaining) for the independent film movement.

But he's developed a following that will show up for a Shelton film whenever a distributor gives it half a chance to open. And none of Shelton's peers -- not even a sacred cow like John Sayles -- has roamed more widely, pertinently or presciently over the American landscape. Even Shelton's most romantic and lighthearted movies, like "Bull Durham" (1988), "White Men Can't Jump" (1992) and "Tin Cup" (1996), challenge American notions of success, celebrity, race and masculinity. Their colloquial poetry energizes lazy or untried leading men: Kevin Costner in "Bull Durham" and "Tin Cup," Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in "White Men Can't Jump." Working for Shelton, these guys get to show off gifts for hardscrabble wit and literate nonsense that reflect their Renaissance jock of a director.

In "Blaze" (1989), starring Paul Newman as Lousiana Gov. Earl K. Long and Lolita Davidovich as Long's lover, stripper Blaze Starr, Shelton paid tribute to the "ruthlessly local" politics that voters now turn to in relief: "It's not about sound bites, and it doesn't care about a certain amount of personal and public corruption if you can do for me and my neighborhood's constituents what needs to be done." And in his iconoclastic portrait of the notorious baseball giant "Cobb" (1994), Shelton probed the conflicts of public image, private misconduct and press management that are as relevant to presidents as sports figures.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

In the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy the movie press has made its specialty, "Cobb" flopped so totally and immediately it never received a wide release. Its strengths -- Tommy Lee Jones' ferocious lead performance, Shelton's wise, original take on Ty Cobb's "Victorian Southern redneck small-town background" and scenes so unique that they should have been taught not only in film school but in creative writing class -- won little praise. But Shelton bounced back with "Tin Cup," a lyrically rowdy golf comedy that said far more about midlife choices than "American Beauty." It was nearly everyone's favorite sports movie of 1997 until the more conventionally romantic "Jerry Maguire" opened at year's end and stole the spotlight.

After spending time on aborted projects like an epic biography of Bob Marley, Shelton has returned with "Play It to the Bone." This infinitely surprising, beautifully acted boxing film starts out as an on-the-road flick with two guys and a girl, and ends up conveying the epic nature of fighting in all its ramifications: commercial, mystical, heroic and homoerotic.

Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson play evenly matched middleweights: best friends who get a last-minute call to battle each other prior to the most publicized event in boxing history -- Mike Tyson's return to the ring. Together they drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with the woman who owns the car, who is both Banderas' girlfriend and Harrelson's ex (Davidovich, who has also been the woman in Shelton's life for the last decade). In its own unassuming way, the film deepens (and grows more funny) until the match becomes the body- and soul-shaking crucible that boxing films always promise but almost never deliver. The combat cleanses the boxers -- all their weird impurities shake out in the ring, to alternately convulsive and heart-stopping effect.

Shelton says that when he and Davidovich first started to go out, he gave her a copy of Joyce Carol Oates' book "On Boxing." Oates wrote that boxing mimics "a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will," and that "the triumphant fighter is Satan transmogrified as Christ." Shelton plays daring riffs on both those themes. And by giving us equal rooting interest in the two fighters, his movie provides a rare chance to view boxing as art and as calling.

Originally slated for a November release, "Play It to the Bone" received only cursory attention in the slick magazines' fall movie round-ups. But the film's distributor, Disney, is so enthusiastic that it has rescheduled the picture for a pre-Oscar platform opening, with December premieres in New York and Los Angeles before a cross-country break in January.

Shelton himself is re-energized. Based in Santa Monica, where he shares offices with his producer and Shanghai'd Films partner, Stephen Chin, he hopes to continue making his own movies quickly and efficiently (this one cost a mere $17 million) and going to the studios only to distribute them.

"I hate the conspicuous waste and excess and stupidity of the studios," says Shelton. "And I hate whining and complaining, which I think the independents do. But if you raise your own money and use the studios for distribution -- that may be the only way. We're talking about cutting the studio out of the loop, putting the financing together and then going back to the studio for distribution because that's what they control. It's a bizarre business now. The studios are not even in the same business as we are anymore. They are small parts of giant international corporations. You used to think Warner Bros. made films; no, Warner Bros. is a small piece of Time Warner. And management reflects that. It's money-laundering, and if they can figure out how to do it as well without making movies, they will, because movies are messy." Shelton spoke recently with Salon Arts & Entertainment.

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