Air film review — Ben Affleck’s love letter to a pair of trainers

Writing 1984, George Orwell pictured a boot stamping on a human face forever. Ben Affleck has a more upbeat vision: the entire world buying the same basketball shoe. His perky new movie Air is a period piece, set in that same year, with Matt Damon and Viola Davis among the stars. It tells the origin story of the Nike Air Jordan. The film is a love letter to consumerism wrapped in a corporate legend, inside a feelgood workplace comedy. The result is so deeply un-dystopian, it even makes a gag of the literary association.

“So Mr Orwell was right,” sighs Nike marketing chief Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman): his gloom triggered by limp annual sales projections. The line might have been written for Steve Carrell in The Office, but Strasser was real. The tone is that of the underdog story; the Nike of 40 years ago imperilled by lack of cool.

The cure is youthful rookie Michael Jordan, though the film limits him to glimpses, seen only with his back to camera. (The logic of not making an accidental biopic is sound. The execution looks barmy.) The genius the movie is really made to salute is Sonny Vaccaro (Damon), Nike’s tucked-away basketball guru who alone sees the scale of Jordan’s pending greatness. And so we follow him dragging his bosses into what is hoped may be a modestly lucrative partnership with the new king of the court.

Sonny duly doorsteps family matriarch Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis). Etiquette be damned in a tale of maverick spirit. The mood is knockabout, but Damon gets a rousing speech, Davis a couple of meaty scenes, and Affleck plenty of screen time himself as Nike co-founder Phil Knight, played as an exasperated dad in ’80s leisurewear.

Affleck the director cranks the nostalgia hard. The jukebox soundtrack (ZZ Top! Cyndi Lauper!) suits smoothly efficient comedy. Fun is had with foul-mouthed agents and the Nazi past of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. But for all the seeming mischief, the film treads carefully. Jordan is not all that is minimised. Other versions of events make Strasser a more valuable player. (He died in 1993, after leaving Nike.) But missing altogether is the wider, complicated context that makes Air Jordan such a transfixing story: the rougher edges of Nike’s reputation; the violent crime in American cities later sparked by desire for the shoe. (For those insights, Yemi Bamiro’s 2020 documentary One Man and His Shoes comes highly recommended.)

Every deal is defined by what it leaves out. But once Air is done redacting, it can be hard to say what’s left. The clearest sense of why any of this matters boils down to royalty payments for elite athletes. God knows, not every film needs Aaron Sorkin, but Air makes quite a contrast with the writer’s Steve Jobs, another corporate fable set in 1984. There, at least, was a film convinced it was about nothing less than everything, everywhere being changed forever.

Instead, Air pitches the simpler pleasure of Damon and Affleck shooting good-natured actorly hoops, with Bruce Springsteen cued in time for the credits. The finished product is painlessly watchable with an occasional likeness to the facts. In that, it is not unlike Argo, the true-ish story of the Iranian hostage crisis Affleck directed in 2012. That movie won the Best Picture Oscar, a history the scrappy mavericks behind this one, Amazon, will be hoping repeats itself. Now as in 1984, everyone loves a happy ending.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from April 7