“Air” tells the story of Nike’s signing of Michael Jordan

Sonny Vaccaro is a slightly overweight, middle-aged marketing manager in Nike’s ailing basketball division who frequently visits college games across the country to find promising players for his employer. On the way back to Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, in the lonely upper left corner of the United States, he often arranges a stop in Las Vegas to visit the casinos.

His routine is always the same. First, he makes money from sports betting. Then he loses said money at the roulette table. How can Vaccaro be so good at one form of gambling but so bad at another? Since the risks of sports betting can be mitigated by knowledge of the sport, roulette is just random chance.

That’s what Air wants viewers to keep in mind as the opening sequence ends. The film, which tells the story of how Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon, convinces Nike to team up with Michael Jordan and create the iconic Air Jordan shoe, premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival in early March. It will be available on Amazon Prime on April 5th.

In 1984, a partnership didn’t seem like a good idea. Not to Nike, not to Jordan. Jordan was unmatched, his meteoric potential only apparent to Vaccaro and his own mother, Deloris, played by Viola Davis. Nike, on the other hand, was pushed out of the market by its competitors Converse and Adidas. Converse had the biggest players; Adidas was Jordan’s favorite brand.

Air is well researched and well written. Business negotiations in the film play out more or less as they do in real life, at least according to the ESPN documentary The Last Dance. In the document, Jordan says that while he preferred Converse and Adidas over Nike, only the latter was desperate enough to give his yet-to-be star a personal shoe line.

Occasionally, reality is distorted for the sake of suspense. In the film, Nike employees know they will be fined by the NBA because their bold Air Jordan design is too colorful. In truth, the company was unaware of this rule until Jordan was already wearing it on court. However, by that point, they were already making so much money that the fees were just a rounding error.

If you’re hoping to learn more about your favorite basketball player, you may be disappointed. Jordan himself rarely appears. When he does, he is shown from behind and only says a “hello” here and a “thank you” there. That’s because the movie isn’t actually about him. It’s about the businessmen who fought for the right to market his name and likeness.

Fortunately, the script doesn’t ignore the fact that the vast majority of these businessmen were white. Vaccaro’s colleague Howard White (Chris Tucker) disapproves of the lack of representation in his industry, an industry that was built on the backs of black athletes. In completing the historic deal, Deloris insists that Nike give Jordan a share of the proceeds from the sale – an unusual but fair deal that Nike reluctantly accepts.

Air examines not only the racism that permeated the basketball business, but also sexism. At one point in the film, Vaccaro mistakenly assumes that a clerk is his colleague Rob Strasser’s secretary. On another, I swear I saw David Falk (Chris Messina), Jordan’s seedy manager, examine his own secretary’s ass as she walked away after giving him something.

While these small details don’t directly serve the plot, they add dimension and depth to both the setting and the character. Ben Affleck, who also directs alongside the role of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, pays close attention to both. 7-Eleven shelves are stocked with groceries that were discontinued decades ago. Strasser (Jason Bateman) unnecessarily uses paper towels to dry his hands.

These creative touches help humanize a film that, at its core, functions like a big Nike ad. The struggling company, which refuses to give up its humble Pacific Northwest origins by moving to the East Coast, compares favorably with Converse and Adidas. The former is depicted as a faceless company. The latter, we are repeatedly told, is run by Nazis. Nazis!

Contrary to what the marketing campaign might suggest, Air is not a sports film. It’s a capitalism film rooted in a relatively new and, to my knowledge, undefined genre that, despite its entertainment and artistic merit, primarily serves to glorify American corporations, entrepreneurs, and consumer goods.

For context, other movies and TV shows in this genre include, but are not limited to: The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle, The Social Network, The Founder, Jobs, The Dropout and – most recently – Tetris, about A game that no one plays anymore and that is relevant today only because it made its creators a ton of money.

Even when these films and shows are skillfully crafted—which, as I said, they often are—a part of me can’t help but feel offended by them. They’re like a physical manifestation of commodity fetishism, comfort food for a culture so hopelessly obsessed with its own purchases that the film industry can market sneaker and video game origin stories as if they were superhero movies.

To illustrate, there’s this scene in Air where Vaccaro & co. come up with the name “Air Jordan,” which is treated exactly the same way Christopher Nolan treated Bruce Wayne when he came up with the name Batman in Batman Begins , or Joss Whedon covered the Avengers who decided to call themselves Avengers. It’s a scene that wants to make the audience cheer. Instead, I snorted my beer. But just because Air is more about business than basketball doesn’t mean the film lacks soul. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are just as emotionally connected to their Jordans as they are to the real Jordan because — as Vaccaro states in a compelling speech — the shoe makes them feel connected to their hero. It’s good marketing, sure, but it’s also real.