Luis Tiant lights a cigar in the new movie "The Lost Son of Havana."

The movie is called “The Lost Son of Havana,” it’s about Luis Tiant’s trip to the Cuba of his childhood, the first time he had been back in 46 years, and it should be a must-see for both baseball fans and fans of the human spirit.

For “The Lost Son of Havana” is about many things.

It’s about fathers and sons. It’s about dreams and the price we pay for them. It’s about the pull of family and place, and it’s about the emotional journey all lives are about at their core, regardless of how they play out.

You have to be at least middle-aged to remember Tiant in his prime, but suffice it to say there’s never been anyone quite like him. Yes, Roger Clemens and Pedro had more talent, and, yes, Jim Lonborg had a season to die for in ’67. But no pitcher in my lifetime ever captured Fenway Park the way Luis Tiant did.

Tiant pitches for the Red Sox in the first game of the 1975 World Series.

AP photo

The word “artist” can be overused in sports, but Tiant was indeed an artist with a baseball in his hands. To see him pitch for the Red Sox in the ’70s, routinely turning his back to the hitter, his windup some baseball version of a guy running a three-card monte on a street corner –– now you see it, now you don’t –– was to see someone turn his craft into something very close to art.

All this, of course, punctuated by the omnipresent cigar in the locker room.

He had come to the Red Sox in 1971, after once being a star with Cleveland and having battled through arm problems and failing with Minnesota. He started in the Red Sox’ organization in Triple A, but the next year it was as if pixie dust fell out of the sky and settled on his shoulders. By the end of the year he was the best pitcher on the staff. And one September night as he walked across the right-field grass to go into the bullpen and get ready for the second game of a twi-night doubleheader, the Fenway crowd gave him such an ovation his teammates joined in, “LOOIE…LOOIE” floating in the air like a religious chant.

When he came to hit in the bottom of the eighth that night, the chant started again, continued through his at-bat and into the top of the ninth.

“I’ve never heard anything like that in my life,” Sox icon Carl Yastrzemski said.

That was the start of Tiant’s cult status in Boston, and it lasted until he left Boston after the ’78 season.

That was the baseball part of Tiant’s story, the one that existed on the sports page.

The other part of the story was the human one, the story about a Cuban kid who had left home for the United States in 1961 to chase his baseball dreams after his father had told him that there was nothing for him in Cuba, the same father who had spent years pitching in the old Negro League, kept out of the major leagues because of his race.

That was the back story to Tiant’s journey through the major leagues: the fact that he could have the career his father never did. The fact that, in a sense, he was pitching for both of them, the son taking his father’s dream out to the mound with him in all those American cities through so many baseball summers.

The other part of the story, of course, was the price he paid for all this.

We saw the fame, the money, the cheers, the realization of the American Dream, even it came with a Cuban accent.

We didn’t see the fact that he could never go back to Cuba again, even if Fidel Castro allowed Tiant’s parents to travel to the United States in 1975, baseball having the power to thaw out the cold war between the United States and Cuba if only for a while.

That was the time, as shown in “The Lost Son of Havana,” when his parents flew into Logan Airport in Boston, where Tiant embraced them, tears streaming down his face. Five days later his father threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Fenway Park.

But we didn’t see the psychic pain that existed in the midst of the love fest that had become Luis Tiant in Fenway Park in the ’70s. That is what comes across so dramatically in this powerful movie, the price tag Tiant paid for his baseball life, as successful as it was.

At the heart of “The Lost Son of Havana” is his desire to see his homeland before he dies. For he is 67 now, not old certainly, but no longer the young man who used to have Fenway Park chanting his name.

It’s also a movie that’s extremely well-done, made by Jonathan Hock, with the Farrelly brothers as executive producers, and shows a slice of Havana that most of us have never seen. It is a city with all its forlorn splendor, full of pastels and warm colors, the centerpiece of this country that sits just 90 miles off Florida, but so many worlds away too, this country that for so long now has been wrapped in mystery.

We see its poverty. But we see its life, too. Like the men who gather every day in a park and argue endlessly about baseball the way we call talk shows and argue about politics, baseball as the national sport, even if some of their greatest players must sneak out of the country to see their dreams come true.

Most of all, we see Tiant as he visits his elderly aunts, whom he hasn’t seen in 46 years. We see him deal with some of his cousins, who find out he’s back in Cuba, the return of the prodigal son.

And most of all we see Tiant himself, always with his cigars, this man who is so obviously caught up in this emotional journey. This proud man who wanted to see the Cuba of his childhood one more time, this man who saw his baseball dreams come true, but now realizes they cost him a piece of his heart, too.

This lost son of Havana, home at last, if only for a movie.

breynold@projo.com