Air ★★★½
BIOGRAPHY (2023)
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Viola Davis.

Two and a half decades after Good Will Hunting, old friends Ben Affleck And Matt Damon unite again to be the first to be directors to tell the story of the rise of a sports brand Air Jordan and her empire itself Nike in the mid 1980s.

Sonny Vaccaro presents an iconic athlete (Michael Jordan) who can add value to a unique product – an extension of himself.

It’s 1984, specifically, and the basketball division of the Oregon company is preparing to… shut down because it can’t attract new talent. NBAwhich usually leads to agreements with competitors Converse And Adidas.

However, one of its executives, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), intends – to the point of obsession – to sign league rookie Michael Jordan by convincing the company boss (Ben Affleck) of an unprecedented in sports history special.

One of the biggest success stories in the annals of global marketing as well as pop culture takes on a human dimension here thanks to the real people who made it happen. Obsessed with basketball and its heroes, Sonny Vaccaro presents an iconic athlete capable of adding value to a unique product extension of himself that will bear his signature. For him, that particular player at the time was 20-year-old Jordan, but he doesn’t even want to hear about Nike finishing third at the time. Somewhere in there, Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis), Michael’s overbearing mother, comes into play, and Vaccaro realizes that what he really has to do is convince her.

Affleck leads with his usual spunk, on the one hand being very knowledgeable about a particular story as well as sports, and on the other, starring exemplary Ben Affleck. And rookie Alex Convery’s screenplay, while rather uncritically idolizing the human-product identification, has just enough humor to balance the dramatic climaxes.

Finally, the choice to never see Michael Jordan himself (that is, the actor who plays him) turns out to be quite fortunate, which adds even more fog to the legend of a man who took off not just from a sports company, but from all of sports. , creating global trends that are well preserved to this day.