Ben Affleck's Air is the next great American sports movie

One of the more classic American sensibilities is our persistent stubbornness to give up on something when we believe in it.

You can track it all the way back to the Revolutionary War to find a bunch of scrappy, powdered-wig wearing forefathers who were so against paying those ridiculous taxes on their goods that they’d go to battle for freedom.

For all of the flaws that engulf the idea of “American exceptionalism,” we are an exceptionally headstrong people when we want something.

Ben Affleck’s Air walks the fine line in extolling these virtues. On one hand, there is a direct thrill in watching Affleck’s dramatization of how once-underdog shoe company Nike usurped the basketball competition giants of Adidas and Converse to land Michael Jordan’s sponsorship.

Affleck’s as gifted behind the camera as he is in front of it, and he knows how to ring from history a snappy, monologue-filled headrush of racing against the clock and defying the odds on the sheer power of belief and savvy corporate maneuvering.

You get all the archetypes of the underdog story: the guy we root for who powers himself on good-faith tenets (Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro), the benevolent authority figure who pushes our protagonist when necessary (Affleck’s Phil Knight), the supporting players who fuel our protagonist’s efforts (Jason Bateman’s Rob Strasser, Chris Tucker’s Howard White, Matthew Maher’s Peter Moore) and the moral center who makes everything happen (Viola Davis’ Deloris Jordan).

The villain is more of an obelisk, a system that seeks to use sponsorship to build up product rather than the other way around. Vaccaro’s genius in seeing Michael Jordan’s potential was understanding that he was the marquee event, not the sneaker he was sporting. As a couple of our main players note throughout the film, it’s not about the shoe as much as the person who was wearing it.

As your sneaker closet may spoil for you, Nike succeeded in courting Jordan against the firm pushes of Adidas and Converse. The Air Jordan absolutely changed the basketball shoe world. The deal revolutionized the way we market products around athletes and forever altered the means of compensation on sponsorship deals to build up the individual as much as the company. In a little boardroom in Oregon, sports shifted for good.

Affleck’s film successfully rallies around the underdog narrative with the same gleeful disruption of sports movies like Jerry Maguire and Moneyball. Those pillars of sporting films – the former fictional, the latter inspired by real life – dealt directly with merry marauders who pushed against the old guard of athletics and found a new way forward.

Air is an outstanding example of how to execute that story with enough gravitas to get you cheering in your seat when a billion-dollar company is able to schedule a meeting with an NBA player for a marketing pitch.

It’s a hair-raising, chest-pumping sprint to the finish, built on inspirational platitudes and fiercely written exchanges about ideals. Alex Convery’s script would make Aaron Sorkin proud, and its entertainingly clinical dismantling of power structures would have Steven Soderbergh foaming at the mouth.

Damon is the perfect fixture point, with he and Affleck’s scenes together channeling that uncanny chemistry that they’ll always have. They’re the closest thing we have to a Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau partnership. Tucker, Bateman and Maher, all tremendous, further humanize Vaccaro’s quest, and Davis turns in one of her better performances as the Jordan family’s steely, empathetic patriarch who is hellbent on making sure her son’s generational potential is realized on the most just path.

Throw in Affleck’s quirky take on Knight and Chris Messina’s smarmy, full-throated imagining of sports superagent David Falk, and you’ve got one of the finest ensembles we’ve had in ages. This film can’t work without its cast.

Affleck’s direction is as precise and energetic as it was with Argo, another story about determined Americans racing against the clock to defy the odds. However, his film isn’t shallow enough to not address the Nike-wearing elephant in the room.

Indeed, while there is clear inspiration to the Jordan/Nike story, there is also the finicky trouble with hyping up a billion-dollar corporation’s quest to make a crap ton of more money. The means of production so often leaves behind the worker who makes it possible, and Air savvily takes the Air Jordan deal and adds vital context in the third act about the thankless system that largely governs our economic groundswells.

The film shows that Deloris Jordan wanted her son to get a cut of the Air Jordan shoe sales because she knew Michael was going to be a megastar, and she didn’t want him to get lost in the tidal wave of unpredictable American commerce. Jordan is one of the richest athletes to ever play because of the terms of the Nike shoe deal, and many athletes have benefitted from that over time.

Affleck’s film tries to show the importance of what the Air Jordan deal gave athletes all while making the quest to secure that sponsorship as exciting as overtime in a Game 7 of an NBA Finals. The film is too smart to ignore the corporate greed and risky optimism that can fuel our biggest corporate achievements, but it’s also nuanced enough to celebrate the marriage of good-faith economics and pure belief.

The Air Jordan deal left plenty of winners, and it’s easy to root for the victory. You have to remember that this is a story told through Hollywood’s purview, one that can’t fully unpack the complexities of Nike and its business dealings. However, Air can unpack the brazen foundation that builds all of our competitive successes, and Affleck’s film does so masterfully. It’s a film that inspires you to fly all while reminding you what it takes to have wings.