Gabe Polsky, 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 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 at the Telluride Film Festival in August and at Cannes in May, where hockey is surely the last thing on most people’s minds.

‘RED ARMY’ Rated: PG Opens Friday at Kahala 8

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 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 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.

The star of "Red Army" is Viacheslav Fetisov, known as Slava, who was the team captain and a national hero until, in the late ’80s, he began to insist on his own independence. He refused to defect, but even so demanded the right not only to play in the National Hockey League but also to keep the money he made there. Worn down by his stubbornness, the Soviet authorities eventually agreed to let him go, and Fetisov played for the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings, where he won two Stanley Cups, but not before the government ostracized him and had him arrested and beaten.

In the movie, Fetisov, who returned to Russia in 2002 at the invitation of Vladimir Putin to manage the Olympic team and become the minister of sports, is a proud and elusive figure, charming and witty in one scene, bored and aloof in the next. For long moments, he ignores Polsky’s questions and studies his cellphone instead. At one point, he flashes him the middle finger.

"Slava’s a very complicated guy," Polsky said recently. "I still don’t understand him. He can be very intimidating. I think he’s a lot like he was on the ice. He was a defenseman, you have to remember. He’s rough. He challenges you. He always had me on my toes. If he sensed I wanted him to say something a certain way, he would block that immediately and say the complete opposite."

With his wide Slavic cheekbones and piercing eyes, Fetisov is still a little intimidating. In a recent interview in New York, he even re-created — whether consciously or not, it was hard to say — some of his scenes in the movie, answering some questions at passionate length, deflecting others, studying his cellphone (two of them, actually) and once waving the middle finger again.

Recalling their first meeting, Fetisov said: "Another reporter, doesn’t look very smart. But he was very well prepared. I will give him that tribute." He added, "I’ve been interviewed a lot in the last 40 years, and only a few I could talk to, and then I could say something but not be open."

As in the movie, he seemed conflicted about the last 25 years of his country’s history. On one hand, he has no use for the Soviet system. He compared Tikhonov, his old coach, to Stalin, saying: "Coach with no heart, can he teach us to play? No. He give us drills, discipline. He wants to see us still as puppets, dancing to his whistle for the rest of our lives. That’s dictatorship."

The style of hockey they played was not Tikhonov’s invention, he pointed out, but rather that of the beloved Anatoly Tarasov, who turns up in some archival footage in the movie, looking like a cheerful, potbellied Russian bear.

"Tikhonov never played this style himself," Fetisov went on. "All he needed to do was let us play. At age 22, 23, we became the No. 1 line in hockey. For us, it was fun, a challenge: inside the most unfree system, to create a beautiful game."

On the other hand, Fetisov, who sits in the Russian Duma, or legislature, and counts himself a friend and admirer of Putin, is no fan of what happened to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. "You know what we did in the ’90s?" he said. "We exchanged our patriotism for the American dream. When I go to students, I tell them: ‘You know what the American dream really is? To be a patriot.’ For us, patriotism was a kind of shameful thing after the collapse. There were no heroes. The country was in collapse — nothing. Who are the young people going to follow?"

Even the state of Russian hockey, with its thriving Kontinental Hockey League, was not much solace to Fetisov. Following his example, he complained, talented young players rush off to big salaries in the NHL before they develop a truly Russian style. "Nobody wants to see the big picture," he said.

Polsky said it was his own shortcomings as a hockey player — or his failure to connect with Yale coach Tim Taylor, more Tikhonov than Tarasov in his view — that led to his becoming a filmmaker in the first place.

"If he had believed in me more, then maybe I wouldn’t have been so passionate to tell this story," he said. "There should be more Tarasovs, not just in hockey but in life."

© 2015 The New York Times Company