When I eulogized Tom Brady’s career back in February when 80 For Brady came out, a chunk of my argument centered around the very nature of the biographical sports narrative feature. The filmmaker is at an inherent disadvantage in trying to recreate the hits of an athlete’s career: if you do a recreation, you’re fucked because there’s already much better documentary footage out there. If you use that footage, and don’t have anything interesting to supplant it with, your audience will just want to watch those documentaries instead. You’re always going to be competing with the image that any given audience member will have in their heads of the athlete at their prime, ephemeral moments of adrenaline and excitement, and the iconography can be stymying. This is especially true for someone like Michael Jordan, who rolled off iconic moments like hundred dollar bills at the golf course ever since he hit that jump shot in the final seconds of the ‘82 NCAA title game. Hell, a whole generation that wasn’t even alive for most of the Bulls’ championship run was convinced of His Airness’s greatness by The Last Dance, the kind of hyper-rare docuseries phenomenon that only time and dedication and boundless amounts of footage can put together. To make matters worse, we have tons of documentary footage of when he beat the Monstars with the Tune Squad, and we all know we owe our lives to him and that secret sauce.
Ben Affleck, somehow, has come up with the answer in the form of Air, which, alongside something like Uncut Gems, is among the best modern-day films about sports and the industries surrounding it. I was skeptical about this project from day one, not because of the talent involved — Affleck is a great director who needs a really compelling story to truly get cooking, and the assembled ensemble was fantastic on paper — but because it felt easy enough for it to fall into the corporate hagiography trap. Nike doesn’t really need anybody’s help in selling itself: The company sells its image and the related ones of its branded athletes better than practically any fashion company on Earth does when it comes to moving actual product. It’s the rare case of modern fashion advertising making its way through notoriously hard-to-sell-to populations and actually achieving aesthetic change through their designs. And, as such, there was a genuine risk that this could be a two-hour commercial for shoes you probably already own (hell, I was wearing a pair of flyknit red Air Maxs when I watched this a few weeks ago). Though they’re linked at the hip, trading Jordan’s associated feats for stills of Nike footwear seemed like a poor deal, accompanied by bullshit Phil Knight maxims and catchy slogans.
Yet Affleck is smarter than that. Though Air is about the shoes, money, it’s also about a moment of revolution for all involved. In 1984, where our tale begins, Nike was a distant third in the business behind Converse (who have a roster of greats like Magic and Larry Bird at the forefront of their campaigns) and Adidas (who represent then-fashionable styles and the European competition, which Jordan is enamored with), and they’ve got a lot of ground to make up. In fact, if they don’t make it up as soon as possible, they’ll probably have to shutter the whole basketball division. That’s bad news for Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a salesman and basketball scout who knows more about the game and has already done a ton for it (he established tournaments for young high school all-stars to show off their stuff in an era when that really didn’t happen) than pretty much anybody else you could actually name. We’re introduced to him as he hits up local high school games in the midwest, stops in Vegas to place some bets on NBA action, and makes his way back to Nike headquarters in Washington state all set to “Money For Nothing,” an ironic bit of musical commentary given that Vaccaro is the kind of person you’d expect to have some level of similar cynicism as the protagonist of the Dire Straits’ hit.
No, Vaccaro is a true believer. He doesn’t just like having his job, he likes being in the field, watching games, and picking potential superstars whose status he can help elevate in whatever way possible. The problem is that he’s surrounded by folks who really don’t want to take any risks, who are comfortably settling with mid-range draft picks as the faces of their company because they can’t envision anything else being feasible. His boss, Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), is sympathetic to his cause and bemused by his passion, and his boss’s boss, Knight (Affleck), respects him even if their relationship is testy from time to time. Knight’s a weird dude, a prototypical modern CEO in an era where that stereotype was still in the gestation stage, spouting off Buddhist lore left and right and driving a hot-purple Porsche to the office clad in his running gear. But they’re the dream team, even if they don’t really realize it. That’s when Vaccaro, after a long night in front of the television, hits on a grand idea: taking the budget they would have used for three mid-level athletes and using it, instead, to try and sign a would-be superstar. That, of course, is a kid from Wilmington, NC, whose parents, Deloris (Viola Davis) and James (Julius Tennon), are keen to get their son the best possible deal from any shoewear company as a way of securing his future.
Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery go out of their way to try and stress that this was anything but a sure deal, and Vaccaro’s stubborn faith in his idea — centering an entire division around a single athlete who hasn’t even played a minute of professional ball yet — is what leads to the inevitable Gems comparisons. Sure, he’s not gonna get popped in the head like Howie Ratner if the bet hits or not, but he will cause a few hundred people to lose their jobs. And along with that comes a decent amount of rule-breaking — in order to sell the Jordans on why they should get their kid to sign with a shoe company that doesn’t have a proven track record of success in his sport, he bypasses the kid’s agent (a hilarious Chris Messina) and visits them personally at the family home, which is a huge no-no in that world. But Deloris is somewhat persuaded by the man’s faith in her son, which is something that none of the other companies, with all of their resources and branding, can equal. More importantly, he’s willing to risk everything to ensure this happens, no matter what the conventional wisdom — or, for that matter, what the dude at the gas station says about Jordan’s prospects. And though some manner of wit and guile, he’s able to get Nike near the promised land.
That wit, which Convery sets up for the Affleck alley-oop, is the key to Air’s success. The screenplay is impossibly funny and occasionally moving, which are two lanes that Affleck is often underrated for, given the action-heavy nature of his prior work. The man has a natural understanding of the rhythms of speech and dialogue and structures his scenes in a way to spotlight them, and it’s been his strongest asset as a filmmaker for the entirety of his career. The things one remembers about Argo aren’t the eventual rescue or the circumstances of the hostage-taking, but rather the scenes in Hollywood with Alan Arkin and John Goodman. The Town has good action, but it has solid characters at its core and an involving story as a result. Here, unencumbered by a requirement for adrenaline-centric setpieces, Affleck really gets to show off just how absurdly talented he is at managing a cast equally strong in both comedy and dramatics. Messina and Chris Tucker (who plays one of Vaccaro’s bosses) are hilarious, and Damon acts as a comic foil to them and the rest of the ensemble, but when the time comes to make meaning and drive home the film’s thesis, he and Davis are able to make it cohere.
Where Vaccaro sees a gamble, Deloris sees a hedge. She’s looking for that company that sees what she sees in her son — who, I should also mention, is only seen from behind and has, perhaps, a single line of dialogue — and who is willing to provide him with a guarantee to his future. This is where her innovative requests — profit sharing being the most important — take center stage. Unless you’re prenatally gifted with the Secret Sauce, betting on your kid to actually succeed in the sports world is a long shot: athletes get dispassionately fucked over by their governing bodies, teams, agents, business partners, and fate itself. It is a tough, tough world, and the rules were set up for a bygone era in which professional sports barely even existed and amateur competition was all there really was. But with colleges making millions of dollars — the highest-paid public servant in your state is probably a college coach — that disparity only grows between the unpaid labor providing that value and those who reap their rewards. In a way, as much as it’s about the business of sports, Air is about the first cracks starting to break through in the dam of NCAA regulations, with Vaccaro’s later advocacy on the part of the players being referenced in more ways than one.
But Air is really about the birth of an icon and the creation of an industry around him. As mentioned, Affleck only shoots Jordan in-scene from behind and lets us fill in the details. But for one magical moment, during a speech that Vaccaro gives to the family after unveiling the first Air Jordan model to them and realizing that the pre-packaged greatest hits video is just boring everyone to death, he relents and lets forth a collection of moments, iconic and infamous, from Jordan’s life. It’s a rare acknowledgment of the man wearing the Hanes as anything other than a golden god: that his success on the court was a way of transcending his humanity. It’s the price of becoming a legend, the one-two punch of scrutiny giving way to a kind of mystical acceptance of the supernatural skill he possessed, proving in real-time Vaccaro’s thesis, that no one would give a good goddamn about that shoe until he put them on and dunked from the three-point line. It’s that interrogation of this image, through the depiction of its crafting, that makes Air a genuinely novel and unique sports film, as well as one of the best modern-day films about advertising you’ll ever see. It’s a bit rosy-eyed in that respect, but I imagine more folks are going to sign up for classes and look for careers in the field because of what they see here: A chance to become storytellers and prophets through the crafting of secular iconography.