Only Hollywood could make a feel-good sports drama about 80s capitalism in which the underdog is a multibillion-dollar industry titan – and make it so rousing, contradictions, cultural baggage and all.
Director Ben Affleck's Air is the story of how one of history's most iconic sneakers, the Nike Air Jordan, came to be. It's also, in another way, about how a bunch of middle-aged white dudes wheeled and dealed to charm a young Black superstar in waiting, bringing NBA rookie Michael Jordan into the big business of pop culture.
Hard as it is to believe now, back in 1984 Nike were a distant third in the basketball shoe game, their market share paling next to Converse and Adidas.
But a lot of things were different in the early 80s, as evidenced by the film's heady opening montage, a pop culture overload set to – what else could it be? — Dire Straits' satirical jab at the era's excess, Money for Nothing. (The song's incantatory "I want my MTV" seems to summon the tale into being, its eeriness reconfigured as nostalgic celebration.)
It's typical of Air's playful tone, where a knowing embrace of cliché – and the performers' wry sense of self-deprecation – is part of the fun.
Witness Affleck, wearing a permed wig as Phil Knight, the Nike CEO with a grape purple Porsche and a head full of Zen aphorisms, who's introduced in heroic silhouette to the funky, hubristic sound of George Clinton's Atomic Dog.
His startup swagger is offset by Matt Damon's pudgy, polo-shirted Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike talent scout charged with bringing new NBA players into sponsorship deals – and giving the brand the boost it desperately needs to be competitive.
Problem is, Converse has heavyweights Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on their roster, and all the kids want to wear Adidas – including Jordan, who looks set to sign with the German sportswear giant.
The three stripes are also the toast of the hip hop scene thanks to Run-DMC's embrace of the iconic shell toe sneaker, while Nike's reputation for running shoes has done little for their cultural cool. ("Black people don't jog," notes Nike executive Howard White, played by Chris Tucker in a welcome return to the screen.)
"Mr Orwell was right, 1984 has been a tight year," says Nike marketing director Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), words almost certainly never spoken but cheerfully deployed by first-time screenwriter Alex Convery – who knows the business of sports negotiation goes down better with tongue-in-cheek pop culture references. (No 80s-set sports movie would be complete without a shout-out to "the eye of the tiger".)
Given that we know how all of this turned out, it's a credit to Affleck and his cast that Air is such a compelling, enjoyable time. The director's Oscar-winning Argo showed he knew his way around a true story while adding just the right amount of Hollywood flash, and here he leans all the way into cinema's exhilarating sense of make-believe.
It's the kind of film where the mention of "Michael Jordan" is followed right on cue by Mike + the Mechanics' All I Need Is a Miracle, one of a succession of 80s jukebox smashes so numerous they're almost a running gag; where Jordan's agent David Falk, played by a hilariously blustery Chris Messina, is more Gordon Gekko – or Patrick Bateman – than Jerry Maguire.
Meanwhile, the unveiling of the Air Jordan sneaker, in a research lab presided over by designer slash mad scientist Peter Moore (the very funny Matthew Maher, co-star of 2022's Funny Pages), has the mysterious-yet-goofy air of a magic act.
Curiously, we never see Jordan himself, beyond archival footage. Affleck says that the basketball icon was simply "too famous" to be portrayed without distracting the audience, which tends to make sense until Jordan's absence – most notably in a scene in which Vaccaro delivers an cheesy pitch to the young player, whose back remains to the audience – starts to call into question his agency.
It's an issue addressed by the prominence of the star's mother, Deloris (a typically brilliant Viola Davis, cast at the insistence of the real-life Jordan), who proves to be savvy when it comes to tangling with her son's potential sponsors. She knows she can't break a system set up to exploit its players, so the next best thing is to game it – resulting in a deal that would become pivotal in the arena of sports endorsement.
As Vaccaro is fond of saying, "A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it."
And then it becomes a phenomenon.
What makes Air fascinating is that we're not just witnessing the birth of a sneaker, but the dawn of an entire business model; the minting of a culture. Within a few years Jordan would go on to become not only one of the NBA's greatest players, but would ascend to a level of fame that saw him inhabiting the rarefied stratosphere of Bugs Bunny and Michael Jackson.
Though the celebratory tone – all adrenaline-fuelled triumph – can make it seem a little too enamoured of money's irresistible allure, the film is not immune to a sense of moral complexity.
In one scene, Bateman's Strasser explains his surprise at learning the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA – one of history's most notoriously misused songs – were less patriotic than he'd imagined. He also acknowledges Nike's fraught manufacturing presence in South-East Asia – but confesses he needs his job to keep his estranged daughter in footwear.
It's a surprisingly dark moment dropped into the middle of the nostalgic entertainment, and one that gets reiterated in a bombastic closing montage – which rattles off the spectacular financial achievements of the film's main players – set to, you guessed it, Born in the USA.
The irony is surely not lost on Affleck, who seems to understand that his Generation X sense of subversiveness is futile in the face of a perfectly designed American product.
As any kid who has coveted a pair of Jordans will tell you, it is a beautiful shoe.
Air is in cinemas now.
