Basketball: A Cinematic History

Few subgenres are more malleable than the basketball movie. Be it the hardwood gleam of a stadium game, the slick blacktop of amateur streetball, or the grubby business behind-the-scenes, Hollywood has always been homecourt for this most cinematic of sports. It’s a matchup that dates back to the Silent era, when MGM put out The Fair Co-Ed, a vehicle for star Marion Davies. She plays a female player who joins the college team to get closer to her coach, a set-up which marked the genre early as one fit for other formulas: in this case the screwy romantic-comedy, a designation that led to producer William Randolph Hearst denouncing it as cheap. But the film was a hit, and the cinema of basketball has been coming at a steady clip ever since. 

The sport has been especially prevalent at the cinema in the recent past, with High Flying Bird, The Way Back, Uncut Gems, Hustle, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Champions, Air, The First Slam Dunk, Rise, and a White Men Can’t Jump remake all being released since 2019. As a list, it’s one of variable quality but multifaceted method, from Soderbergh’s continued experimentation with form – High Flying Bird was shot on an iPhone 8 fitted with an anamorphic lens – to Air, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s two-hour advert for a shoe (an enjoyable film that is also evil garbage). 

Combine that list above with the pandemic lockdown-influenced spike the sport received with The Last Dance, and you have a genre fashionable like it was in the 1990s, when a Jordan-inspired Chicago Bulls propelled basketball back into the popular imagination. Back then, in a stretch roughly synchronous with the Bulls’ period of dominance, a serious list of basketball films were released, all of which resisted the easy rags-to-riches prescription of the organised-sports picture: White Men Can’t Jump, Blue Chips, Hoop Dreams, Above The Rim, The Basketball Diaries, and He Got Game. 

Received wisdom has it that sports films have to follow a formula, though, and this is still true of a great many basketball movies: The Way Back is Coach Carter is Glory Road is Hoosiers. All of these films hew to a heroic structure when the teams in question start winning basketball games under the tutelage of a flawed but inspirational leader. 

But for every against-all-odds depiction of local sporting triumph, there is an example of the genre bending to accommodate something greater. Indeed, the game’s recruitment method – mostly young, black, poor athletes lured to elite colleges under the auspice of making the NBA, sometimes known colloquially as Never Broke Again – ensures that the basketball movie is a natural artistic instrument for examining race and wealth in America. The best examples are excoriating about it. Take that 90s list: Hoop Dreams is bleak on the path African-American teenagers are required to tread at mostly-white schools if they want to even be in earshot of the NBA. It played at Sundance and caused a mini controversy when it wasn’t nominated for the Academy Award for Best documentary. 

Blue Chips is a fictionalised account of the larcenous backdoor negotiations involved when top institutions want to sign the hottest talent, with Nick Nolte playing Pete Bell, a once-great coach trying to resist the illegal urge to bribe and poach prospect players. Rival universities are leaving him behind, see, and doing so by offering the best youth-level players unimaginable wealth and a way out of their working-class hometowns. One especially uneasy scene sees a room of white representatives from the best basketball colleges openly auction a young black player, the horrible parallels of which do not need explicating here. Bell violently resists – there is a classic Nolte meltdown upon a player telling a staff of old school coaches that thirty-grand should secure his services – then caves, then exposes the corruption at great personal cost. 

White Men Can’t Jump is about as graceful as pop filmmaking can be. On the surface it’s a touch formulaic – the basketball movie as buddy comedy, with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes bickering in pursuit of streetball greatness. But there’s a unique grace to the game’s form that makes it perfect when transplanted to the cinema, and despite its intended standing as comedy box office fare, the film is the purest distillation of the fluid beauty of basketball’s movement that I can name. The configuration of a classic jumpshot; pirouetting circus passes; lay-ups that kiss the backboard and fall through the net, barely bothering it: basketball just looks right when it’s projected big in a way that other sports don’t. You only need to look at any instance of football on screen to understand that simply replicating the action in film form won’t cut it; there is yet to be an accurate depiction of the game in over a century of cinema. But basketball’s action can be isolated, as in White Men Can’t Jump, where Snipes and Harrelson trade simple, perfect-form jumpers for five minutes, the camera God’s‑eye as it watches the ball arc through empty air and into the clanking metal of a chainmail net. 

Elsewhere, you only need to read the title to understand that White Men Can’t Jump is a provocation acting as a joke, and while the film does climax with Harrelson eventually dunking the ball to win the game, it remains that woven within the cliched architecture of the film is a loaded back-and-forth – deployed as rapid repartee between the leads – about the race relations that dominate any serious off-court discussion about basketball. The remake is of course risible.

Not all of the 90s output was as vital and savage, however; if it seemed harmless at the time – and was a child’s gateway to the game in the manner of Air Bud and Like Mike after it – Space Jam presaged so much about where both basketball and cinema were going, a puerile endeavour more concerned with money and merch, that eventually reached its nadir with Air, which knows how contemptible its fawning over naked avarice is because it feels the need to add a note at the end stating that Phil Knight has donated $2 billion of his sneaker money to charity. (What it leaves out is that this is mostly to his own charitable foundations and that it comes in the form of appreciated Nike stock.)

If this trainer-talk seems beside the point, then know that the modern game is reliant on its apparel endorsements, and that wrong decisions of this sort can be bad for your career, as shown in Lenny Cooke – the basketball film the Safdie brothers made before Uncut Gems – where we see Lenny show up at an Adidas training camp in a pair of Jordans. This is one of a number of negligent moves on Lenny and his money-hungry entourage of wish-promising agents’ part, and the player (who was rated the best young star in the country) ends the film a decade later watching his rival LeBron James on TV. Lebron – the star of Space Jam 2 in the way Jordan was for the original – is still playing today, undoubtedly one of the greatest players of all time. But Lenny Cooke was said to be as good as him, perhaps even better. The tapes of a young Lenny which make up the first half of the film were shot in 2001 by Adam Shopkorn, designed to be a text on the ascension of a great young talent. Instead, the Safdies picked up the footage a decade later, and completed the filming of a very different documentary. As critic John Semley writes: ​“Hoop Dreams was meant to be a warning against all of this: the exploitation of young black athletes, the false promises of bootstrapping upward mobility through sports, the lies that dangle on the stick of American nationhood.”

No discussion about the cinema of basketball would be complete without something on Spike Lee, the sport’s most ardent film-world fan since Jack Nicholson stopped being seen courtside at every Lakers home game (Nicholson made his own basketball film in 1970, his raucous directorial debut Drive, He Said). 

The recent NBA playoffs again saw Spike cheering on his beloved Knicks at Madison Square Garden, still alternately raging and rejoicing like he was seen doing in Reggie Miller vs The New York Knicks, a 30-for-30 documentary depicting the Knicks/​Indiana Pacers rivalry that has at times seen Lee cast in a more prominent role than some of the players. His is a true devotion, though, melding sport and art at multiple times throughout his career, including directing the commercials for those first Nike-backed Jordan sneakers and a vital documentary for ESPN called Kobe Doin’ Work, a day-in-the-life type thing that has become especially poignant in the years since Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020.

Most importantly, Lee directed He Got Game, in which he cast NBA player Ray Allen in the lead role opposite Denzel Washington. Real life players had often shown-up in basketball movies – Blue Chips had Shaquille O’Neal’s name on the poster the same size as Nick Nolte’s – but in truth these were as supporting roles in smaller films, or stunts. If He Got Game did have a precedent, it was in Cornbread, Earl and Me, an underseen but influential film that starred NBA rookie-of-the-year Jamaal Wilkes as the titular Cornbread, gunned down by white policeman in a case of mistaken identity. But Lee’s film puts an amateur on screen for about as much time as its star, and much of it hinges on Allen’s ability to go one-on-one with Washington, the estranged father of a family freighted with the tragedy that landed him in prison. 

No one is claiming that Ray Allen is performing miracles in He Got Game (his character is literally called Jesus, mind), but he holds his own against Denzel, and that’s not nothing. This is testament to the idea that basketball players make for natural on-screen actors: through an alchemy of their size and presence and charisma, it can be said that the NBA has produced more successful crossover acting performances than most other disciplines. The apotheosis of this is Kevin Garnett, playing a fictionalised version of himself in Uncut Gems – ​“Big Ticket” every bit as dominant in the middle of Safdie Brothers mania as he was on court – but you can also point to Anthony Edwards (current NBA star du jour) and Juan Hernangómez (European journeyman) in Hustle, both of whom put in assured dramatic performances.

Hustle stars another celebrity basketball fan, Adam Sandler, in a return-to-serious-acting showcase, but it was of course Uncut Gems that started the movement. I’ve seen the Safdies’ film referred to as basketball-adjacent, which would put it in a list with The Basketball Diaries and The Last Picture Show et al, the sport as scaffolding on which a non-basketball narrative is hung. But any film as invested in the particulars of the NBA playoffs as Uncut Gems is a basketball movie proper, not least when the majority of the dialogue is made up of the minutiae of US sports betting, a foreign language of parleys and under/​overs and vigorish and money lines and spread. 

This illegal activity runs through so much of basketball and its representation on screen (the sideline bets of White Men Can’t Jump; the points-shaving scandal in Blue Chips; the owed debt that stalks James Caan in The Gambler), even more so than in the cinema of baseball or the NFL – sports which outrank basketball in terms of national pastime status and are commensurately sentimental about it. 

If much of the above has focused on the serious and ugly side of the sport, know that there is love here too: Spike’s basketball-across-America montage that opens He Got Game; Pete Bell ending Blue Chips by playing a pickup game with some preteen city kids, his passion not completely destroyed by an institution desperate for ​“Rhodes scholars who can dunk”; Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball, a beautiful and authentic film that splits itself up into four quarters like they are the changing seasons (and is the rare example of a black female director depicting a black female player’s career), slipping questions about gender and identity and performance and obsession into what is otherwise a studio sports picture. 

Placed against the more unholy aspects of the game, these examples show the uneasy duality of the basketball movie, and, by extension, the sport itself. One young player’s heartbreak is another’s creation myth. A coach can lose it all except for what counts. A pair of players wary of the other’s ethnicity combine harmoniously on court and forget that not so long ago, they swapped racial slurs. That last illustration comes from White Men Can’t Jump, a film wherein trash-talking subsumes poetry as a streetballer invokes John Keats and says that ​“a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” As an epitaph to the history of the basketball film, I can think of none more fitting.