You'd be forgiven if you were to initially recoil at the thought of voluntarily watching a gaggle of middle-aged white dudes relive a football game they played 40 years ago. Plus the film's title tells you that the game in question ends in an unsexy draw. But you're also wise to the fact that sports flicks traditionally allow the contest to serve as context, and through the recollections of the participants and slightly grainy TV footage of the actual match, the thrilling documentary "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" uses one comparatively irrelevant game between two unbeaten Ivy League powerhouses to paint a larger picture of an America dealing with unimaginable loss, radical change, and polarizing conflict, both at home and abroad.

By the time the Harvard and Yale teams met in late November, 1968 had witnessed the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon's election to the nation's highest office. But there was pigskin to be played: the sociopolitically insulated Yalies, led by a quarterback that hadn't lost since middle school, were taking on the working-class Harvard scrappers, ROTC men alongside student protesters, and their supposedly impenetrable defense. A 22-6 rout by halftime, and still up by 16 with 42 seconds to play, Yale thought they had the game sewn up. Harvard didn't agree: "I remember telling myself to be cool and stay smooth. And think," remembers former Crimson lineman Tommy Lee Jones.

Yeah, that Tommy Lee Jones. And the bizarre trivia abounds: Jones' roommate, eventual winner of both an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, figured out "Dixie" on his newfangled touchtone phone. One Yale player roomed with Dubya, while another posted antiwar flyers with his girlfriend, a pretty Vassar activist named Meryl Streep. "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" drags a bit whenever filmmaker Kevin Rafferty lets long stretches from a mostly boring game play out on the screen, but what keeps you riveted is that enigmatic title, lifted from the next day's headline at Harvard, as well as the anecdotal hindsight of these largely charming men, some of them still shell-shocked from the experience, but all of them having learned something profound, and much bigger than just football.