James R | On 13, May 2023

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Chris Messina, Jason Bateman
Certificate: 15

From McDonald’s to Tetris, biopics have turned their eyes in recent years from stars to brands, giving the Hollywood treatment to the tales of how well-known companies and products came to be. Call the American Dreamification of the American Dream, stories of how people won at capitalism – even as we also get the trend’s fascinating counterpart, the bubble-bursting stories of Theranos, WeWork and more. Nike’s Air Jordan is the latest to join the trend, and while it doesn’t quite soar, it’s certainly got some bounce to it.

Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, the basketball guru hired by Nike to find themselves the best stars to sign up to sponsorship deals – as long as said stars don’t cost too much. Tired of aiming at mid-table players who don’t make an impact, he hits upon the idea of sponsoring just one player: Michael Jordan. With Converse and Adidas both able to offer more money, Sonny hopes to win Jordan and his family over with a different pitch: a shoe built around the player, rather than a player being moulded to fit a shoe.

The result, as we know, goes on to be a defining moment in sports, sportswear and sports marketing. That kind of foreknowledge isn’t a problem when you’ve got a human drama to root for, but in Air’s case, we’re being asked to root for an already sizeable business. No matter how much the film tries to frame Nike as the underdog, it’s hard to care about one company making more money than their rival also-large company – it’s a long shot from Halt and Catch Fire.

The film does has some skills in its locker, with Alex Convery’s script serving up a number of snappy one-liners and Affleck assembling a dream team to sink them in the net. They include Jason Bateman as marketing director Rob, Chris Tucker Nike’s NBA liaison Howard, and Chris Messina as Jordan’s agent, David, plus Affleck himself as Nike’s CEO, Phil. The MVP, though, is Viola Davis, who was requested by Jordan himself to play his mother, Deloris. She’s a towering presence and lights up the whole court whenever she’s on screen, giving gravitas to the savvy protective streak that Deloris needs to navigate the off-court games that face her son. That she reportedly improvised the movie’s best line – “a shoe is just a shoe until my son steps in it” – comes as no surprise.

Jordan, meanwhile, is kept cheekily off-screen, a move that helps to capture the bigger-than-life legacy of the whale all these companies are trying to land. But his absence also reinforces the film’s biggest misstep, which is to take the wrong perspective on the narrative entirely, sidelining the Jordan family – including Julius Tennon as his amiable but quietly alert dad, James – when this could have been a King Richard-esque story of two parents attempting to guide their future star.

The result feels like a corporate movie rather than an artistic one, which is sadly ironic given the production company’s exemplary commitment to equity and profit-sharing. If you want an insightful tale of Michael Jordan’s impact on sneaker culture, see Yemi Bamiro’s unflinching documentary One Man and His Shoes. If you want the American Dream repackaged by Hollywood, Air foots the bill comfortably – but you wish it tried to jump higher.

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