The new era of basketball movies is aimed at expert-level fans

To the top of Ben Affleck’s sneaker procedural Sky, the big lords of Nike’s basketball division sit around a conference table debating the merits of the players in the 1984 NBA draft. They have a $250,000 budget to split between three prospects, meaning they’ll inevitably be outbid by the giants of Converse and Adidas for the right to sponsor the design’s top picks. So they look further down the draft board: The fifth pick, Charles Barkley, is mired in “clubhouse issues” and “no one is going to want to see him on TV”; the 16th pick, John Stockton, played his college prom in Gonzaga, and “no one even knows where that is”; Melvin Turpin, drafted sixth, seems like the safest bet – he apparently has “great vision,” though Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) notes that he only averages one assist per game. In 2023, of course, we know that Barkley and Stockton are Hall of Famers, Gonzaga is a perennial powerhouse, and Turpin has never done much in the league.

These kind of winks to viewers who know, hidden everywhere Sky by rookie screenwriter Alex Convery, are nothing new. Since at least 1980, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar complained of dragging Walton and Laimbeer down the field for 48 minutes in Aeroplane!, knowing nods to a savvy, basketball-watching audience are embedded in movies that touch on the sport. But a new generation of basketball movies has reflected a new generation of basketball fans, one as adept at collective bargaining, overseas scouting, sports betting and shoe deals as the product on the court. In a world where every move an NBA GM makes spawns a hundred podcast episodes, Hollywood has adapted and spawned a flurry of movies that delve deeply into aspects of the game that seemed unthinkable in the days of Hoosiers.

In fits and starts, this revolution has happened before in sports films. Bennett Millers Money ball managed to film the seemingly unfilmable story of a renegade GM and a Yale economist who use sabermetrics to find undervalued baseball players. by Ivan Reitmann draft day dropped viewers into the Cleveland Browns’ war room during the NFL draft. Even Jerry Maguire, in his own dramatic ’90s fashion, saw former journalist Cameron Crowe unearth some of the esotericism of sports agencies. For fans of those sports, it’s natural to see themselves in these ancillary characters — think of the overwhelming popularity of fantasy football and baseball, both of which dwarf the audiences for NBA fantasy leagues. But basketball culture is primarily driven by black youth culture, and the inevitable tension between the game and the business interests surrounding it is only now being explored in depth on screen.

High flying bird makes that tension his main obsession. Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 drama is set during an NBA lockout, with the league’s owners and players deadlocked over their new collective bargaining agreement. The film follows the maneuvers of super agent Ray Burke (an excellent André Holland) as he negotiates with seemingly everyone in the basketball universe, toward goals that aren’t always apparent to anyone but him. It’s a dense, cerebral film that throws its audience among the sharks and asks them to swim, but it’s devastatingly insightful about the symbiosis of basketball and commerce.

Working from a script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright behind the story that inspired Moonlight, Soderbergh’s harsh iPhone cinematography crams viewers into offices, boardrooms, living rooms, bars, restaurants, gyms, saunas and wherever basketball is played. Fans today are more interested than ever in understanding how NBA sausage is made, and Soderbergh doesn’t leave out any of the nasty bits.

“They invented a game on top of a game,” says Spence (Bill Duke), a seasoned basketball coach and fixture in the South Bronx. Spence is the kind of guy who spent the past 40 years in a tracksuit and still thinks three-pointers and slam dunks are gimmicks; anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows a few Spence. Through the dissertation of High flying bird in his mouth, McCraney and Soderbergh seem to draw a contrast between old-school hoopers and money-obsessed new jacks.

However, it’s not that simple. The lockout also ruins Spence’s money, making it difficult to get pros to his charity events, and it is illegal for him to advertise that they are there. It soon becomes clear that the lockout is everyone’s problem, and the player-first streetball revolution that spends half its run teasing the movie never materializes. (Like Kevin Durant’s viral Rucker Park pick-up game during the last real-life lockout, High flying bird‘s climactic, off-screen one-on-one game is a one-off.)

The lockout ends because it has to end, because the game on top of the game simply feeds too many mouths. It’s a bittersweet but authentic ending, and life has already imitated art: Earlier this month, owners and players basically agreed on a new CBA, avoiding another lockout for at least seven years.

Image: A24

Another prescient 2019 basketball movie was Uncut gems, Josh and Benny Safdie’s anxious look at the underworld of sports gambling. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler and problem gambler who always thinks his next bet will be big. (Spoiler: It does, until it doesn’t.) The Safdies and Sandler bring Howard to life in part by clouding his very real passion for basketball with his judgment-clouding gambling addiction. His aggressive bets are terrifying, but for the most part, they’re rooted in a deep understanding of the game. Meeting Kevin Garnett is a thrill for Howard for more reasons than the potential to make money off him.

Uncut gems is set in 2012, when sports betting was largely illegal in the United States. These days, it’s impossible to watch an NBA broadcast without being bombarded by sportsbook ads. Howard’s vocabulary of prop bets, over/unders and parlays was played as an insider even shady in 2019. Now it is commonplace. This has already started to bleed into the game in ugly ways. After a game in Orlando in March, a fan addressed Wizards All-Star Bradley Beal outside the arena, screaming, “You fucked me for $1,300, motherfucker!” Beal rightly retaliated by saying, “I don’t give a fuck about your bets or your parlays, man. That’s not why I play the game.” We now live in Howard Ratner’s world.

Sandler’s hoop fandom extends far beyond his own Uncut gems character, and he let it fuel his passion project for 2022, Rush. With his dozens of high-profile cameos and deep basketball vocabulary, Rush is the biggest love letter to the NBA in this line of movies, but still offers some sharp critiques of the league’s machinery.

The film follows Sandy Sugerman, an international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers whose life is an endless cycle of low-level games in lighted gyms, fast food dinners in five star hotels and business class flights to who knows where. Sugerman is promoted to the bench early in the film, but he is sent back to the field for one last job when beloved team owner Rex Merrick (Robert Duvall) dies and his failure Vince (Ben Foster) is left in charge. (As an aside, Foster plays the best dick owner in all of these movies, a little better than an unbearably smarmy Kyle MacLachlan in High flying bird.)

Photo: Scott Yamano/Netflix

The rest of Rush is catnip for amateur draftniks. Sugerman discovers Bo Cruz (real life NBA player Juancho Hernangómez), a streetball hustler in work boots, while on assignment in Spain. He practically smuggles Cruz back to Philly when the Sixers’ front office indicates they are not interested. “There are 450 players in the NBA, and 100 waiting to be called up,” Sugerman told Cruz. “It’s my job to know everyone.” With the mainstreaming of recruiting news, mock drafts and televised international and development competitions, many fans now feel they have the same job.

But being a prospect (or a scout who needs to find them) is hard work, and most of all Rush is about the unglamorous grind of looking in from the outside. Cruz participates in combine harvesters, showcases, scrimmages, pre-draft workouts and endless hours of some of the most grueling workouts shot on film outside of the Rocky franchise. Rush is great, and certainly a much less subversive movie than High flying bird or Uncut gemsbut it constantly reminds fans that an NBA job is just that: a job.

The most recent in this wave of postmodern basketball movies doesn’t portray life in the NBA at all, but is defined by it anyway. Sky‘s Sonny Vaccaro is making the rounds on the same amateur hoops circuit as Stanley Sugerman, but he has no plans to sign any NBA roster candidates. He wants them to wear his shoes. Sneakerhead culture and basketball culture are deeply and inextricably intertwined, but Sky depicts a time before signature shoes existed, and invites the public to witness their birth.

Director Ben Affleck gives a light-hearted account of the genesis of Nike’s Air Jordan line, but follows the ins and outs of the contract negotiations step-by-step. As with the rest of these films, most of the action takes place off the basketball court, in conference rooms and corner offices. Michael Jordan himself is a bit player whose face never appears on screen, a controversial choice that sometimes seems contradictory Sky‘s player empowerment story.

Affleck defended his decision by saying that Jordan is “too big” for a movie that’s really more about merchandising and labor, and in reality he’s probably right. A story about the machinery that surrounds the sport – the game on top of the game – cannot be told by the most transcendent stars. In the age of social media, fans have unprecedented access to LeBron James, Steph Curry and, yes, even Michael Jordan. But they also know more than ever about basketball players Ray Burkes, Stanley Sugermans and Sonny Vaccaros. We also get to see their stories on film these days, and it portrays a richer, more nuanced vision of the world of basketball.