When I saw a trailer for Air, I had no idea what to make of it. A part of me just couldn’t quite believe that someone made a movie about the birth of a popular sneaker. Yes, I am aware there are people who actually collect sneakers these days like people do things like stamps or old coins. I just don’t quite get it. Regardless, a movie about the birth of the Air Jordan? That seemed weird to me. And it had Matt Damon in it?
Then I saw that Damon’s old buddy Ben Afflect, also in the movie, directed it. OK, I may not get why someone made a movie about sneaker licensing, but I do like Affleck’s directorial efforts.
It’s 1984, and Nike is in third place for sneaker sales, at least as far as their basketball line goes. Talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) has a job: find the next big thing in basketball and sign them to an endorsement deal. The problem is Nike doesn’t have a lot of money for that–they mostly sell running shoes–and the best and most promising players tend to sign with the two bigger companies, namely Adidas and Converse. Sonny sits in marketing meetings where he’s generally the only guy who follows up-and-coming basketball players, and he has his eye on one special player: Michael Jordan. Rather than sign three players like Nike normally would, Sonny has a radical plan to sign just one as he believes Jordan might actually be the one.
However, Jordan is in high demand, and while Sonny may be willing to put his job on the line, he’s actually putting a whole lot more on the line. Sonny’s plans, such as they are, involve going around young MJ’s agent and talking directly to his mother Deloris (Viola Davis, and apparently Michael Jordan’s only request was Davis play his mother), often without consulting his own superiors within Nike, including the eccentric (and often barefoot) company co-founder Phil Knight (Affleck). As it is, this is about making a deal, one where Sonny is actually inventing a new way to get an endorsement deal, and all over what is basically an untried rookie.
Now, this is history. Even a guy like me whose interest in sneakers and basketball is almost nonexistent knows the Air Jordan is one of the biggest shoes in the world. As such, the real attraction here might be to see how, not if, it happened, and director Affleck made a good call here by never showing Michael Jordan’s face outside of archival footage. Jordan is not the point here; Sonny is. He’s a guy who believes in a player who isn’t even considering Nike, and he’ll do what he can to get the guy to sign. He’s fortunate that the people he works with are amenable to helping with a little prodding, even if that prodding took the form of Sonny going behind people’s backs and making deals without telling anyone first.
That is what more or less makes the movie: the various oddballs and eccentrics Sonny works with. Damon has a good everyman vibe going here, but then there’re people like Affleck’s Knight, a man who seems to go around barefoot despite founding a sneaker company when he’s not wearing the company’s most garish 1980s track suits in the office. Other characters, played by the likes of Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayans, and Matthew Maher (as perhaps the movie’s highlight playing sneaker designer Peter Moore) all lend the movie an easygoing charm. This is one of those mid budget movies that it’s said studios don’t make anymore. There aren’t really life or death decisions on the line, and everyone watching the movie probably already knows what’s going to happen. It’s just a nice, breezy film about getting a guy to sign a sneaker endorsement. Basically, it was the opposite of Hypnotic. You know, a movie that knows what it’s trying to do and does it as opposed to something batspit insane that never quite gets the tone right.
Grade: B+
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