Gabe Polsky, the director of the documentary “Red Army,” likes to say that his film is a hockey movie for people who don’t care about hockey, and its reception so far has proved him right. That the movie was well liked at the Toronto International Film Festival in September is perhaps no surprise. Hockey is, after all, the national sport there. But it was also a hit recently at Telluride and in May at Cannes, where hockey is surely the last thing on most people’s minds. The movie was originally scheduled for commercial release next year, but enthusiasm for it has grown such that it will get a brief run starting Nov. 14 so that it can qualify for an Oscar.

The Red Army of the title is the great Soviet hockey team of the 1970s and ’80s. Officially, the players were members of the Soviet military, but that was just a fiction. All they did was play hockey; they were seldom allowed even to visit their families. Casual fans will remember this as the team that was upset by the Americans in the “Miracle on Ice” at Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980, but losing was something the Red Army did very rarely. The team was in fact one of the best ever to play the game, and for more than casual fans, one of the appeals of the documentary is the footage Mr. Polsky has pried from Russian archives, showing the unusual training methods — players doing somersaults on the ice and carrying each other piggyback — and the uncanny, almost balletic freedom with which they skated and passed to each other.

The paradox, which “Red Army” explores, is that all this freedom and creativity, and the loyalty the players had for one another, was the product of old-style Soviet rigidity. The team had been created as an arm of the Cold War propaganda machine, and it was coached by a heartless martinet, Viktor Tikhonov, whom the players despised. They couldn’t wait to get free of the system, and yet when they finally did, many of them felt lost.