Air - Directed by Ben Affleck
History is written by the winners, and Ben Affleck’s glossy new docudrama, Air, about Nike’s unlikely and ultimately paradigm-shifting shoe deal with a lanky shooting guard named Michael Jordan, is the cinematic equivalent of a victory lap. There’s a recurring joke in Alex Convery’s screenplay that, circa 1984, Nike was best known for its comfy workout apparel. Air works nicely on those terms, as a limber, vigorous jog over familiar territory.
Phil Knight (Affleck) isn’t just the company’s CEO, he’s his own best customer, cruising through suburban Portland in an array of colorful tracksuits. When he gets to the office, he stares down his basketball division’s downward sales curve while Run-DMC trumpets the greatness of their Adidas. Thirsty for market share, Knight instructs in-house hoops guru Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to get thrifty and creative with a minuscule $250,000 budget. Ideally, the amount is to be split among three potential spokesmen, but Sonny, who’s got a paunch and a gambling problem, wants to blow the whole wad (and more) on Jordan, whose game he deconstructs, Zapruder-film style, en route to the unshakable belief that the kid is the next big thing.
Sonny is driven by the poetic, distinctly nonutilitarian idea that the shoe matters less than the person who wears it. He doesn’t know it yet, but his philosophy shrewdly anticipates the larger cults of personality that would come to define American pop culture in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond—the idea that people everywhere would pay a premium if they could be like Mike. We, of course, do know it, and the pleasures and the limitations of Air are bound up in the essential, irresistible frictionlessness of this 20/20 hindsight. Suspense and drama become subordinate to a kind of cozy superiority: The big moments have the exhilaration of windmill dunking on a 6-foot rim. Points are scored on broad pop-cultural reference points from WrestleMania to “Where’s the Beef?,” and characters’ trustworthiness is marked by how they talk about NBA stars whose legacies are long since settled.
Such audience-flattering high jinks are de rigueur in movies of this type, and Air, to its credit, knows exactly what it is. With carefully curated production design and sterile, fluorescent aesthetics—a kind of ambient boardroom hum punctuated by a string of reliable 1980’s pop standards—Affleck’s film belongs to a contemporary subgenre of corporate origin myths whose gold standard is probably The Social Network. But there’s another, even more specific influence here in the form of Moneyball, itself a sort of Social Network clone, right down to the Aaron Sorkin script. The common denominator across the three movies is the presence of self-styled disruptors reshaping various industries in their image—a rare and potent opportunity to yoke together seemingly opposed values of subversion and success.
If The Social Network plays like a millennial Citizen Kane, Air is closer to the light and satisfying sensation of reading a Wikipedia article while shuffling through a good playlist. Affleck has a gift for pacing and working with actors. He got superb performances out of Michelle Monaghan and his younger brother, Casey, in Gone Baby Gone, one of the more impressively fatalistic Hollywood thrillers of recent years; it powers through its own clunky plot mechanics to a nearly wordless final scene whose pathos and ambiguity have a distinct ’70s inflection. Meanwhile, The Town is an instant classic, from the bullet-riddled action set pieces to the scenery-chewing bits from a ferocious Jon Hamm to a mesmerizing Jeremy Renner.
The historical stakes in Air are low, but the movie is even more playfully self-reflexive when it comes to the topic of filmmaking: Affleck and Damon are releasing it under the banner of their new independent production company, Artists Equity, which will strive to reroute back-end profits from streaming to below-the-line talent. Air argues that by giving Jordan a piece of his own sneaker sales, Nike was ahead of the current player empowerment curve—a detail that dovetails conceptually with Affleck’s new startup and informs his endearingly dorky performance as Knight, who famously sold sneakers out of his Plymouth in the 1960s en route to a personal net worth of $46.7 billion today.
Since his ingenious casting in Gone Girl, Affleck has consistently fused elements of his bruised, hangdog celebrity with impressive technique. Consider The Last Duel, in which he conjured up Dazed and Confused levels of repugnance beneath a bottle-blond dye job and douchey goatee. There, he bickered entertainingly with Damon in a sort of anti–Good Will Hunting satire; in Air, he and Damon spend most of the time pumping each other up, and the chemistry between them is undeniable. Damon carries the movie, and Affleck adorns it; his role as Knight riffs on both his indie roots and contemporary neo-mogul status while giving affable, sympathetic shading to a cipher whose extensive résumé as a philanthropist includes significant contributions to conservative causes.
Jordan isn’t really a character in Air (he’s seen mostly from behind or in profile, with only a few cursory lines of dialogue), so the film doesn’t have to worry about idealizing his persona, but the specter of hagiography—not just of Jordan, but of Knight and his employees—still hovers over the proceedings. The near-religious reverence that Sonny has for his potential client is one thing, but telling the story of Nike’s courtship means making underdog folk heroes out of six-figure executives, billionaire CEOs, and their marketing departments, most of whom are white-skinned and white-collared, scanning African American demographics for potential profit margins.
Is it fair to hold Air to any kind of rigorous ideological standard? After all, it’s not as if The Social Network is a particularly progressive piece of work, and it proved shortsighted about the real consequences of Facebook. Read in the broadest possible strokes, Affleck’s film has real acuity about different elements of sports, culture, and industry: It understands how Jordan’s individual brilliance transcended his sport and seduced a generation of consumers; it cares about the engineering and ingenuity that went into making Air Jordans, with Matthew Maher channeling genuine outsider-artist vibes as the eccentric designer Peter Moore; and it pays respect to deep-seated American ideas about risk and reward.
The main takeaways from Air are that an essentially faceless corporation found a way to humanize itself through a perfectly chosen surrogate superhero, and that the middle-aged dudes who made the pick were visionaries. Cool guys that felt they were every-men because they loved listening to “Born in the USA”. But when you’re watching such a triumphant capitalist fable of market dominance, another Springsteen lyric comes to mind: “A king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”
