WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a tale told in three sales pitches:

• To get in the door (“I don’t like to take no for an answer. And I actually think your son should be endorsed by someone with that exact mindset.”)
• To set up the meeting (“I believe in your son. I believe he’s different. And I believe you might be the only person on Earth who knows it.”)
• To seal the deal (“A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it.”)

Schlubby Nike exec Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) has to make other pitches, too. He gets a feeling about Michael Jordan, the skinny guard from North Carolina who took the winning shot in the 1982 NCAA tournament, but he has to convince Nike CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) to bet it all on him, then he has to finesse the kid’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), to not get in the way. 

But these pitches are semi-comic, the men he’s pitching to vaguely ridiculous. The pitches to the family, particularly the mom (force of nature Viola Davis), are heartfelt and poetic.

Aren’t they also a bit of a lie? They convince us that what matters is the words—the pitch—when it really comes down to the numbers: the $250k, the car, the specially designed sneaker, and a cut from all sales of the specially designed sneaker. That’s what wins the day. A pitch is just a pitch until someone comes up with the scratch.

“Air,” written by Alex Convery and directed by Affleck, is a fun, breezy movie, and I enjoyed it throughout, but I felt a little empty afterwards. These are our heroes now? These are our stories? A crummy commercial?

“Air’ also glosses over what I feel is the most important part of the story: the feeling.

The feeling about the shot
Haven’t we all had such feelings or premonitions? I had a very strong feeling that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election, for example, particularly after James Comey opened his piehole 11 days beforehand. The Thursday before election day, I biked down to Myrtle Edwards Park on the Seattle waterfront, massively depressed, anticipating it all, actually thinking of the happy people passing by, “They don’t know what’s about to happen.” What is that? Is it nothing? Is it paranoia? Or is it tapping into … something? It’s either nothing or it’s everything.

Sonny not only has his feeling about MJ but he acts on it. He risks his career on it. Why?

In the movie, it goes back to The Shot. (The first “The Shot” for MJ.) James Worthy was the big man on the UNC team, he was supposed to take the last-minute, down-by-one shot, but watching the video Sonny realizes, no, he was just a decoy. It was always supposed to be the freshman. And why would UNC coach Dean Smith—who rarely played freshman—trust this one freshman over his superstar All-American with the national title on the line? 

And why does no one else get it? Sonny’s in Beaverton, Oregon, but the NBA team down the block misses out. For a time I thought the movie was joking about all the kids in the ’84 draft—Jordan and Olajuwon and Barkley and Stockton?—but it turns out, yes, that draft was legendary and they were all in it. Olajuwon went first and Jordan went third. In between the Portland Trail Blazers picked poor Sam Bowie. The movie should’ve underlined the Oregon-ness of it all. “Why are you so sure when the professionals aren’t?”

Conventional wisdom winds up being represented not by the Blazers’ GM but by a poor cashier at the neighborhood 7-Eleven. Before the draft, he’s all: “Nah, lucky shot, and besides, Jordan is too small to be in the NBA, both him and Stockton.” After everything changes, he’s bitching about the Blazers not picking Jordan. “Everybody knew,” he says of Jordan, which makes Sonny smile. Right, everyone knew. “Air” opens with the Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” (“That ain’t working/That’s the way you do it…”), which is a song about an outsider bitching about an insider, the guy who doesn’t know how hard it is complaining about how easy it looks. And that’s the 7-Eleven cashier here. Poor cashier. Poor fictional cashier. I’m reminded of Tom Hanks’ pompous bookstore CEO showing an elevator operator how to operate elevators in “You’ve Got Mail.”

Hey, Hollywood, leave those working-class kids alone. Pick on someone your own size.

On the spot
Nice cast anyway. Nice seeing Ben and Matt together again. Viola Davis, as mentioned, is her usual powerful self, while Julius Tennon makes a good, charismatic James Jordan, working on his car. I like some of the tennis-shoe history we get (Adidas/Nazis), though I would’ve liked more of it (Puma Clyde/Walt Frazier). The movie tries to dole out credit. Yes, Sonny saw, but Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) helped, Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) designed, Phil Knight signed off. He dared. Team effort. All for a guy who wasn’t exactly a team guy.

Oh right, the MLK story. Right. Marlon Wayans plays George Raveling, who warns Sonny about stepping around the agent to get to the family. But he also tells him about a day when he had his own feeling, when he felt like this event he’d heard about would be important. So he went. And there he heard a speech that meant a lot to him. Afterwards he congratulated the man who gave the speech, and the man thanked him and stuck the speech in his pocket. And when George looked for the words that meant so much to him, they weren’t there. Because the man had made them up on the spot.

The words he was looking for: “I have a dream.”

Most of that is true, by the way. George Raveling was at the March on Washington, and he was given the original copy of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which “I have a dream” does not appear. The problem? Yes, MLK deviated from his prepared speech to get to the dream, but he didn’t make it up on the spot. Read your Taylor Branch. It was part of a sermon he’d delivered the week before in Chicago and Detroit. As MLK paused, near the end of the prepared text, Mahalia Jackson, standing on the dais with him, supposedly said aloud, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Did he hear her? Not known. What is known? He did not, as the movie says, make “the whole speech up—right there on the spot.” But now we’ll have millions of people who believe he did. Thanks, Hollywood.

I’m curious: Are there great Hollywood movies that make heroes out of salesmen like this one does? It is a rarity. In “The Founder,” he’s half a dick, and in “Wolf of Wall Street” he’s 100% a dick. There’s Willy Loman, of course, but he’s tragic. What I wanted with this movie, what would’ve filled me rather than left me empty, was something closer to what Bennett Miller did with “Moneyball,” but I don’t know how you do that with this story. Do you mention that they were so successful that their product not only made billions but actually got people killed? Kids murdered each other over Air Jordans. But that’s not exactly feel-good. 

Maybe the filmmakers did the best they could with the story they had. A dude had an idea, nobody thought it was good, they did it anyway, everybody made a ton of money. That’s not just a Hollywood ending; it’s the ending Hollywood hopes for itself every day.