Air

In a career of too many highs and lows to count, Ben Affleck makes another resplendent return as director, producer, and scene-stealing supporting actor in Air, a film that tells the true story of how in 1984, Nike, then struggling at third place in the athletic shoe business, changed its fortunes forever by landing an endorsement deal with basketball star Michael Jordan.

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to declare any living or dead athlete in any sport as high-achieving as Jordan, but back then, he was only the third pick in the NBA Draft. Even so, he was an NCAA Champion at the University of North Carolina and recent gold medalist at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. And he was beyond the modest budget Nike had set aside for its basketball shoe division’s rookie contracts.

Despite that and Jordan’s reportedly strong preference to sign with industry powerhouse Adidas, talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) believes Nike needs to go all in at courting and landing the Chicago Bulls’ new shooting guard. Against a good deal of resistance from his boss (Jason Bateman) and Nike’s eccentric co-founder/CEO Phil Knight (Affleck), Vaccaro gives chase, ignoring the deflections of Jordan’s brash agent David Falk (Chris Messina) and showing up at the Jordan family’s home in North Carolina. There, he makes an impassioned plea to Michael’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis).

That is enough to secure an official meeting with the Jordans and their representation, prompting Vaccaro, Knight, and others to quickly come up with a bulletproof pitch. That pitch: a signature sneaker called the Air Jordan, which you don’t need me to tell you was — and still is — a game-changer for not just the footwear business and fashion at large but of the very nature of professional athletes.

There’s a great chance that Air Jordans have not played as big a part in your life as they have in mine. I grew up a huge fan of Jordan and the Bulls at the peak of their powers and continue to depend on the brand for my athletic footwear needs. And yet, I am convinced that my lifelong personal passion for Jordans is not the primary reason that I loved Air.

This is just a terrifically made and highly entertaining production, one that serves as a welcome reminder of just how good Affleck is at the helm. He established his directing prowess on the riveting mystery Gone Baby Gone (2007), the compelling bank robber heist flick The Town (2010), and the Iran hostage drama Argo, which won the 2012 Academy Award for Best Picture.

When you’re at the top, which Affleck surely was (even though he somehow failed to earn a Best Director nomination for that hit prize winner), the only place to go is down. No stranger to failure, having endured the early 2000s as a laughingstock for the bad movies he starred in, Affleck was able to endure a lot more turmoil with ease: a big stinking flop in his directorial follow-up, the Prohibition crime drama Live by Night (2016), the collapse of his marriage to Jennifer Garner, and his focal involvement as Batman in the utter shitshow that was the DC Extended Universe.

Has anyone else in the film industry ever recovered from as much personal and professional embarrassment? Affleck rebounded by tackling his demons playing an alcoholic basketball coach in the COVID-kneecapped The Way Back (2020), a film in which he relapsed and did a stint in rehab in the middle of production. While that didn’t earn him a deserved first acting Academy Award nomination, he did land Best Supporting Actor nominations from the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild a year later for his turn in George Clooney’s The Tender Bar. Romantically, Affleck got over his high-profile divorce by dating rising star Ana de Armas and then reconnecting with and marrying Jennifer Lopez, some two decades after the couple first became tabloid cover fodder.

Now 50 and exactly twenty-five years removed from his and Damon’s breakout Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, Affleck is as good as he’s ever been on either side of the camera. He and Damon bring such great instincts and joy to this project and as a result, we get without a doubt one of the best movies to emerge in this challenging decade. The cast has the benefit of an absolutely powerhouse debut screenplay by a complete industry newbie named Alex Convery. If he is not nominated in the category that Damon and Affleck won, something has gone terribly wrong.

Convery does not look to embellish, nor do his uncredited rewriters Damon and Affleck. We get almost nothing in the way of these characters’ home lives and it’s hard to even imagine where dramatic license could have been taken. Instead, the spec script and the film made from it simply delve into the task at hand, sweating all the details and never minding that we know everything is going to turn out more than all right for everyone involved.

As much as it is a testament to ingenuity, dreaming, and Michael Jordan (who, outside of archival footage of the genuine article, is wisely kept out of view as much as he can be), Air is also a love letter to the 1980s. The era in which the cast came of age is celebrated early and often, beginning with the sound of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” accompanying the studio logo and then guiding us into a pitch-perfect montage of pop culture as it existed thirty-nine years ago. Needle drops were an unmistakable part of Argo‘s charm and here, Affleck completely loads up on tunes that have aged well, from the Bulls’ iconic starting lineup theme “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project to Bruce Springsteen’s name-checked, easily-misinterpreted “Born in the USA” to largely forgotten delights including Mike and the Mechanics’ “All I Need Is a Miracle” and Big Country’s “In a Big Country.” The 1980s are further invoked by a mostly-licensed score recycling cues from the likes of Risky Business, Three O’Clock High, and Beverly Hills Cop. Not every piece heard was established by 1984, but nonetheless the winning soundtrack contributes much to Air‘s considerable appeal. It’s not necessarily a backhanded compliment to declare this, as many are, “the ultimate Dad movie.”

While Affleck’s purple-legginged jogger with his desktop bare feet is the standout, Damon’s supporting cast is full of valuable contributions, including Messina as the foul-mouthed, unhelpful Falk, the distinctive Matthew Maher as the Jordan I’s passionate designer Peter Moore, and Chris Tucker as the jovial exec Howard White. Naturally, Davis gets to inject some heart into the proceedings and is as likely as any cast member to command individual recognition next awards season. Everyone seems to be having a good time, perhaps the viewer most of all.

Although it is seemingly more timed to the NCAA championship and the NBA Playoffs than anything else, Air absolutely should compete for major awards next year. Movies are rarely this great at any time of year and Amazon Studios is also doing the noble thing of giving this a proper, wide theatrical release before it settles in as one of the best movies available on Prime for the foreseeable future (which was its intended destination all along). It may be disheartening to see Air a distant second at the box office, outgrossed ten times domestically in its opening window by Illumination’s wretched Super Mario Bros. Movie, Affleck’s clever, diverting adult-oriented film is a crowd-pleaser that will stand the test of time.