Air review: Air Jordan origin story isn't quite a slam dunk

Matt Damon is the quiet icon. We get why Kevin Costner became a contemporary John Wayne 40 years ago, or how Tom Cruise willed himself into becoming our era’s Clark Gable. But Damon is less eager for our love than Costner or Cruise. From Will Hunting to Mark Whitacre to Jason Bourne, Damon’s gallery of quirks and eccentrics presents him as a laureate of male worry. He’s Gary Cooper—master of subtlety—and he steers himself toward an empty space in the heart of American masculinity rarely visited in our cinema of victors, a fraught terrain where losing at life remains a real possibility.

Flop sweat issues from every pore of Sonny Vaccaro, the real-life Nike executive Damon portrays in Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort, Air. It’s the mid-1980s, and Sonny is tasked by would-be New Age robber baron Phil Knight (Affleck) with vitalizing Nike’s athletic sneaker division by landing a celebrity endorsement from the world of basketball. Nike can’t afford to pay for an established star, so Vaccaro has to predict the future. He settles on a rookie named Michael Jordan, but has to out-compete more successful companies like Adidas for Jordan’s endorsement. The rest is mass-market history.

Affleck and his screenwriter Alex Convery think the well-known outcome of Air needs to be bolstered by the mechanics of a suspense narrative, crossed with a Rocky plot trajectory. And for a few scenes, Air feels like a gently satirical movie about corporate skullduggery. But it’s really a sports picture, where outcomes are determined by dedication, and a purity of purpose no one else can match. Damon’s Sonny is the scrappy and unlikely contender, whose love of the game gives him heart.

Chris Tucker is on hand as Howard White, a real Nike executive whose job appears to have been to tell Sonny Vaccaro how much he believes in him, again and again. If Tucker has 10 minutes of screen time, that is two minutes more than register for the viewer. It’s tempting to say Viola Davis is “wasted” in the small but pivotal role of Jordan’s mother Deloris, but Air proves it’s impossible to waste Viola Davis, because her fierce gift always eats the screen. For a masterclass in turning throwaway schtick into truth, watch Davis suppress a laugh when a meeting with the Teutonic directors of Adidas plays out as Vaccaro told her it would. We need to see Deloris’ bemusement, even if the Adidas suits can’t. Davis manifests the moment effortlessly.

The most comical epitome of Air’s own version of flop sweat is the way it shows Michael Jordan. Because it doesn’t—or rather it shows him only from behind, as a shoulder, or as an outstretched hand. Because really, how do you cameo Michael Jordan in his own story, without the audience noticing the movie they’re watching ought to be about him? You can’t. So you cut away to a bizarre montage of the real Michael Jordan enduring the horrors of contemporary celebrity in the space where Matt Damon is forced to address Jordan directly, appropriating the real Jordan’s pain in collage form to paper over a pothole, just because your camera is looking the wrong way.

Another nagging issue with Air is that it’s ultimately about a room full of white guys competing for a prize embodied by a symbol of human greatness who is also a symbol of Black greatness. As if in the world proposed by this film—and films like Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book, and Hidden Figures—racism is suspended by a shared endeavor.

Otherwise, as Affleck has shown before, he is a marvelous director of actors—even great performers outdo themselves here, in material that could hardly be called emotive. As Nike’s marketing director, Jason Bateman gets to utter a line somebody thought would be on the poster: “A shoe is just a shoe until somebody puts their foot into it,” words repeated like writ two or three more times. Bateman is as rumpled and sleek as a small-town realtor, beautifully assaying an even less effectual version of middle-aged maleness than Sonny Vaccaro’s. Damon and Viola Davis are so good together that their phone conversations play like the emotional climaxes of the movie.

Air will do well for Amazon, not only because it’s well-done, but because it’s selling a “true story” a lot of people want to hear, even if, to paraphrase Jason Bateman, a true story isn’t true until you put the truth into it. Ultimately, Air is about the battle for ownership of Michael Jordan’s likeness rights—one of the great business success stories of all time—and it’s told in an entertaining light, even if it’s not quite a layup.

Air will be released in theaters on April 5, 2023