Director Eugene Celico, left, explains a dance move to Rozanne Sher and Michael Mazzeo as they rehearse a scene in The Tournament.

JOURNAL PHOTO / Bill Murphy

The Tournament, which will have its premiere showing tomorrow at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, is a made-in-Westerly coming-of-age movie that is surprisingly more hard-edged and violent than one would expect from a film about a boy who is trying to win over his reluctant father by entering them in a father-son bocce tournament.

Writer-director Eugene Celico has crafted a film that lulls us at first into what seems like an idyllic boyhood for 12-ish Alby Pagano (Cohlie Brocato) in a quiet neighborhood where time seems to have stopped somewhere in the mid 1950s, even though the setting is contemporary. There are big Sunday dinners with a boisterous Italian family that seems to include everyone from the neighborhood — even the parish priest — gathered around the table. There’s the grandpa who lives upstairs and dotes on his expansive vegetable garden. There’s the corner bar, which is actually right across the street, where Alby’s father, Joe (Michael Mazzeo), spends a lot of his off-hours drinking and gambling at cards.

But all is not sweetness and light here. There are no amusing little moments in Alby’s life to lighten the film. His father is a distant character whose mercurial temper can change in a split second at the hint of some imagined infraction.

Joe is hobbled with a dead-end job and a never-ending losing streak at the card table that leaves him in big-bucks debt (for him) to his gambling pals and a loan shark. He takes out his frustrations on his friends and ever-patient, ever-forgiving wife, Elizabeth (Rozanne Sher), striking out with his fists and belt in graphically presented violence.

Joe seems in desperate need of psychiatric help but, amazingly enough, no one in the film seems to have come to that conclusion. Alby thinks he will be able to mend the rift between him and his father by learning Joe’s favorite game, bocce, which apparently is the only thing Joe is really good at, and then surprising him by entering them in the big annual father-son tournament of the film’s title.

It seems a naïve dream, but Celico, who grew up in the neighborhood he lovingly presents on screen, does it with such a subtle sense of this-is-the-way-it-is realism that one begins to feel an affinity to these people and their problems.

What’s not so good, and it becomes almost overbearing at the start of the film, is Celico’s reliance on Alby’s narration to explain to the audience the backgrounds of all the important characters, their relationships to one another and the thrust of the story. In movies, it’s always better to show rather than tell. He cuts down on the narration as the film unfolds, but it’s always there, right to the end, giving The Tournament a clunky sensibility.

The actors, however, generally underplay the material, all on the plus side. Young Brocato is especially good in his unselfconscious, understated Alby, a boy who is trying to understand the big picture. So that Joe doesn’t seem a complete monster, Celico has allowed Mazzeo to show the love Joe feels for his family in several sequences: a lively jitterbug with Sher at the local dance hall demonstrates their solid ties; moments when Joe painstakingly explains the finer points of bocce to Alby. Still, Elizabeth’s protests to her family after one of Joe’s beatings that “He doesn’t mean it; it’s the drink; he’s a good man,” won’t convince anyone. She’s a saint, but a pilloried one.

Sequences involving the town bully, who seems to turn up at the most critical junctures in Alby’s life to threaten his well-laid plans and cast a shadow on Joe’s shaky reputation, seem contrived and over-obvious. But at least these things propel the story and Alby into action.

The Tournament is an auspicious feature-length film that hits close to home and is certain to find people nodding in recognition of many of its characters and situations.

The Tournament will be screened at 5 p.m. tomorrow at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.