Air Review: Ben Affleck’s Poignant Portrait of Nike Aging into Its Michael Jordan Era

Ben Affleck’s Air is ostensibly a biopic about the elevation of Nike’s brand from fledgling shoe company to a behemoth of the sports world. On the surface, the film tracks how sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) spearheaded a massive gamble to bet the company’s entire basketball division budget on then-rookie Michael Jordan. But this isn’t a film about Jordan, and it isn’t exactly a film about Nike as a brand, though the company does get very good, unchallenged, and uninterrupted PR across nearly two hours.

Air also isn’t a film about a shoe, though it spends time with Peter Moore (a charmingly awkward Matthew Maher), creator of the originally banned Air Jordan 1 silhouette. And while Air has been marketed as a film about the powerful force that is Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis), it also isn’t really about the love and guidance that helped to make a legend.

At its deepest level, Air is a film about mortality. It’s one about legacy, about who will be remembered beyond their mortal coil, and who gets to write those stories. Besides himself, Affleck has loaded the film with one actor after another whose public persona has been defined by their on-screen successes. Chief among them is Damon, whose weight you feel as Vaccaro walks around Nike’s no-frills offices back in 1984 in oversized khakis and well-worn polos, his pronounced paunch a far cry from the body-machine that is Jason Bourne.

There’s also Chris Tucker as Howard White, the Air Jordan brand’s “godfather.” Tucker built his fame as the loud-mouthed and larger-than-life Detective Carter in the Rush Hour films, and here he gets to play against that more confident type. In what amounts to cameos, Jason Bateman is weary and bleary-eyed as revolutionary marketing chief Rob Strasser, and Marlon Wayans shows up over beer and wings in all of one scene to make the most of his appearance as former Olympic coach George Raveling, whose endorsement of Nike to Jordan paved the path for the historic partnership. And Jay Mohr stars as an executive for the rival Adidas brand, weakly leading the charge for the heavyweight Germans in the marketing battle of the century.

Given what these actors bring to the screen, it becomes impossible to not see Air as a film about aging, the sands of time, and how legends are built, bought, and sold. It’s why it never ceases to be jarring to see Damon’s Vaccaro out of breath, being ribbed by his co-workers for being overweight and uninfluenced by pressure to be healthier. Not for nothing does Nike’s aging CEO and co-founder, Phil Knight (Affleck), at one point wax poetical using Buddhist platitudes, pretending his grape-colored Porsche isn’t an arrogant show of compensation.

That gravitas makes it easy to overlook Air’s flaws. For one, it’s a bit overeager to emphasize the era in which its set, beginning with the opening credits set over a montage of advertisements and film clips from 1984. (Robert Richardson reliably captures the look of the time, though Wayans’s one scene, which mimics the tactility of surveillance footage, is distracting at best.) There also isn’t a convincing rationale for why so many scenes are punctuated with this or that pop hit of the decade, though more distracting is the gambling metaphor that comes to define the film, with the mission to land Jordan compared as nauseam to games, betting, and risks.

In one scene, Strasser gently but firmly enlightens Vaccaro on the dangers of his all-or-nothing bet on Jordan, provocatively mentioning the exploitation of Thai and Korean workers in the manufacturing of Nike products. That moment is a moving one, but one wishes that the filmmakers had made even more room for an exploration of the ethics of high-stakes capitalism. Elsewhere, Alex Convery’s script practically brings the film to a screeching halt for Deloris to advocate for her son to have a stake in the shoe sales in perpetuity. While this contract decision has played an enormous role in sports contracting (and arguably for the better), it’s difficult to tell if Air wants to be seen as a champion of entrepreneurial capitalism or labor rights.

What Air gets absolutely right, though, and which is dramatized with stellar precision, is how Nike was once unglamorously perched between success and failure, of aging creatives trying to revive their life’s work by way of the young Michael Jordan. Air is concerned with Nike’s desperate hunt for a golden goose, so it’s more than apt that Jordan is barely seen across the film: His face is only shown in archival footage, and in pitch meetings he’s played Damian Young but only glimpsed from behind. This speaks, in a way, to his status of a behemoth of his sport, even if it results in one silly bit of business, when Vaccaro delivers an impassioned pitch and the strained effort to not show Young’s face feels counterintuitively comical.

The investment in Jordan is, as Vaccaro boldly pronounces at one point in the film, not about making the phenom’s life more meaningful, but about making their own lives meaningful. As an office drama, Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan. Perhaps not all of us will create anything that outlives us, but Air shows us that the wanting can be purpose enough.