Air gives us one of 2023’s finest movie assholes

Like so many different forms of art, films invite viewers to reflect on the perspectives and experiences of those who are very different from them. Through this contemplation, this wrestling with intention and perspective, art illuminates the human condition, and perhaps allows an enthusiast to grow and develop as a person. Movies are also a great way to spend a few hours with one completely asshole and be happy, instead of it ruining your day.

Sky, the new movie about the creation of Nike’s Air Jordan sneaker line, features one of the best movie bastards you’re likely to see this year. It’s a corporate sports movie, the perfect forum to spotlight assholes, and it’ll be hard to top Chris Messina’s performance as volatile cop David Falk.

Falk is the real-life sports agent who represented Michael Jordan early in his career when he was a promising but unproven player for the University of North Carolina basketball team and on the verge of joining the Chicago Bulls. The real David Falk has a storied career where he may or may not have been a complete jerk, but into the David Falk Sky is an absolutely delightful jerk who lights up the screen whenever he appears to curse into a phone.

Like Falk, Chris Messina (of whom viewers may know Birds of prey or sharp objects) are Sky‘s de facto antagonist, a brick wall for the film’s hero, Nike talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to throw himself against. Sonny tries to land Jordan as a sponsor for the 1984 version of Nike, which is far from the sports-sneaker giant it is today. Sky portrays Vaccaro as an “athletes are magic”, a true believer trapped in a marketing department full of people just trying to keep the company in the black. It follows him as he tries to convince everyone to embrace the radical 1984 idea of ​​putting the entire weight of the company behind one athlete and designing a shoe that could be branded with his name.

A person Sky does not feature is Jordan himself. Vaccaro instead deals with people who represent Jordan, such as Falk and later Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis). This is Sky‘s most divisive aspect, since the driving and bargaining between Vaccaro, Falk and others revolves around the idea of ​​labor, and how much that labor is worth to the worker and the company eager to use it. A cursory view of Sky would see the film as corporate propaganda, a hagiography of wealthy marketers and executives securing their legacy on the back of the most legendary basketball player in the history of the game. Or maybe it could be seen as a played-out paean to guys like Vaccaro (movies like this almost exclusively four guys) who go with their guts and achieve unprecedented success, despite all the doubters around them who rightly say they are reckless.

But Sky may be about something more complicated than that. For all of Falk’s roar in representing Jordan – and really, Messina does a fantastic job, with the phones he yells at and his impeccably tailored suits – he doesn’t know what he’s got in his client. To Falk, and almost every other character Sky aside from Sonny Vaccaro and Deloris Jordan, Michael Jordan is just a paycheck, numbers on a balance sheet that may or may not work for them. That uncertainty is gone Sky, with a bit of on-the-nose irony that director Ben Affleck turns into a meal. At every moment, he plays on the audience’s irony, knowing that his characters are debating the viability and profitability of the most famous basketball player in the world.

Photo: Ana Carballosa/Amazon Studios

While all these characters are discussing what athletes should be paid for their work, Sky lightheartedly juxtaposes its conflicts with the era’s massive commercial successes. Pop hits from Bonnie Tyler and Run-DMC constantly seep through the soundtrack. Brand names are on the screen and commercials are constantly being sampled to match the era. Alex Convery, the first screenwriter, presents a vision of a corporate-driven monoculture at the height of its last great era, just as it was about to discover one of its last figureheads. Sky is a movie about how hard it is to make a hit somethingand an elegiac tune for a contemporary pop culture landscape where nothing will ever land as hard as the major touchstones of the 1980s.

What makes this movie standout is the way every character gets into it Sky who is not called “Jordan” is only a guess. David Falk is an asshole because he has decided that the only way to get results is to treat every client as an excuse to scare people away from money so that he can increase his personal clout and wealth. While Sonny Vaccaro ends up winning the day, he spends a lot of it Sky‘s runtime as an inveterate gambler in Jerry Maguire fashion, forever a day away from excesses, neglecting his health and personal life to pursue hunches that, he has been repeatedly told, never materialized.

For 112 minutes, white men with money are depicted who spend much of their time convincing themselves and others that they can see where the culture is going, when it’s clear they can’t, because their primary mandate is to protect of their wealth. At his least sympathetic moment, Vaccaro squirms at Deloris’ confident negotiations to give Michael a share of the gross sales on the shoes that bear his name. He knows that’s just not how things are done. In the sneaker business of the time, athletes are paid a licensing fee for their endorsement, and the profit goes to the company — which the execs believe is the true source of value.

Image: Amazon Studios

Blindly loyal to the precedent of this unjust structure, Vaccaro hesitates at the thought of turning it on its head — even telling Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck himself) that he lost the Jordan deal. Vaccaro is surprised when Knight takes Deloris’ condition seriously, and in a fourth-wall-breaking moment of irony, Knight later muses that he may have set a precedent that will rock the industry.

Through impassioned arguments and off-the-cuff speeches, Sky shows the process by which corporations graft themselves onto culture, when true faith and magic collide with the trading machinery, and the exploitation that makes it thrive. It’s a meat grinder built primarily to benefit men like David Falk and Phil Knight, and any windfall the young Michael Jordans of the world have gained is secondary at best. Men with money arm themselves with roar and confidence as they grope in the dark and try to hitch their chariots to someone who does something that will make the people of the world feel like they believe in something again.

Sky ultimately condemns Falk – at least as much as it is capable of condemning anyone – by making the character almost entirely alien to the history the film adapts. It’s Sonny Vaccaro and Deloris Jordan, the film’s true believers, who move the needle, linking Nike’s corporate success to Michael Jordan’s incredible career. As a great jerk, Falk is a great scapegoat, but he’s also an honest jerk; Deloris is the only character in the movie that Michael doesn’t try to exploit. In the end, they’re all assholes whose careers depend on people who don’t know their worth.

Sky now playing in cinemas.