Air is a terrific movie with a particularly great idiot for a villain

Like so many other art forms, films invite viewers to reflect on the perspectives and experiences of people who are vastly different from them. Through this contemplation, this struggle with purpose and perspective, art illuminates the human condition and perhaps allows a lover to grow and develop as a person. Movies are also a great way to spend a few hours with one complete asshole and be happy instead of letting it ruin your day.

Air, the new movie about the making of Nike’s Air Jordan sneaker line, features one of the best movie assholes you’re likely to see this year. It’s a sports-business film, the perfect forum for showcasing assholes, and it’ll be hard to top Chris Messina’s performance as the unpredictable agent David Falk.

Falk is the real-life sports agent who represented Michael Jordan early in his career when he was a promising but untried player for the University of North Carolina basketball team and about to join the Chicago Bulls. The real David Falk has had a storied career in which he may or may not have been a complete jerk, but the David Falk packs a punch Air is an absolutely adorable jerk who lights up the screen when he shows up to swear into a phone.

As Falk, Chris Messina (who viewers may know birds of prey or sharp objects) Is AirThe de facto antagonist of , a wall for the film’s hero, Nike talent scout Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), to throw himself against. Sonny is trying to enlist Jordan as a sponsor for the 1984 version of Nike, which is a far cry from the sports sneaker giant it is today. Air portrays Vaccaro as an “athletes are magic” believer stuck in a marketing department full of people just trying to keep the company in the black. It follows him as he tries to convince everyone to embrace the radical 1984 idea of ​​putting the company’s entire weight behind an athlete and designing a shoe that can be branded with his name.

A person Air Jordan himself isn’t there. Vaccaro instead has to deal with people who represent Jordan, like Falk and later Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis). That is Air‘S the most divisive aspect, as the back-and-forth between Vaccaro, Falk, and others revolves around the idea of ​​work and how much that work is worth to the worker and the corporation that seeks to exploit it. A cursory look at Air would see the film as corporate propaganda, a hagiography of wealthy marketers and executives securing their legacy on the back of the most legendary basketball player in football history. Or it could arguably be seen as a played-out paean to guys like Vaccaro (movies like this almost exclusively celebrate guys) who follow their gut instincts and find unprecedented success despite all the doubters around them who rightly say they are ruthless.

But Air it could be something more complicated. For all the gossip of representing Jordan – and really, Messina does a fantastic job at the gossip, carrying the phones he yells into and his immaculately tailored suits – he doesn’t know what he has about his client. For Falk and almost every other character in it Air Aside from Sonny Vaccaro and Deloris Jordan, Michael Jordan is just a paycheck, numbers on a balance sheet that may or may not work for them. This uncertainty prevails Air, offers a bit of irony on the nose that director Ben Affleck makes a meal of. At every moment, he plays up the audience’s irony, knowing that his characters are debating the viability and profitability of the most famous basketball player alive.

As all of these characters debate how athletes should be paid for their work, Air casually contrasts its conflicts with the massive commercial successes of the era. Pop hits from Bonnie Tyler and Run-DMC constantly filter through the soundtrack. Brand names liven up the screen and contemporary commercials are sampled constantly. Screenwriter Alex Convery presents a vision of the corporate monoculture at the height of its last great era, just as it was about to discover one of its last hallmarks. Air is a film about how hard it is to make a hit anythingand an elegiac tune for today’s pop culture landscape where nothing is likely ever to land quite as hard as the great touchstones of the 1980s.

What makes this film so striking is the way each character comes into play Air if your name isn’t “Jordan”, you’re just guessing. David Falk is an asshole for concluding that the only way to get results is to treat every client as an excuse to blackmail people for money so they can increase their personal influence and wealth can. While Sonny Vaccaro eventually wins the day, he spends a lot of time Air‘s running time as a diehard player in Jerry Maguire Modus, forever a day away from washing up, neglecting his health and personal life in pursuit of hunches he’s been told repeatedly have never come true.

112 minutes long, it portrays white men with money who spend much of their time trying to convince themselves and others that they can see where the culture is going when it’s clear they can’t because that’s their primary mission is to protect their wealth. In his least sympathetic moment, Vaccaro squirms at Deloris’ confident negotiations to give Michael a cut of the gross sales of the shoes that bear his name. He knows that’s just not the case. In the sneaker business of the day, athletes receive a royalty for their support and profits go to the company – which executives believe is the true source of value.

Vaccaro is blindly loyal to the precedent of this unfair structure, and he shies away from the thought of turning it on its head – he even tells Nike CEO Phil Knight (Affleck himself) that he lost the Jordan deal. Vaccaro is surprised when Knight takes Deloris’ condition seriously, and in a moment of fourth-wall-breaking irony, Knight later muses that he may have set a precedent that would turn the industry on its head.

Through passionate arguments and impromptu speeches, Air shows the process by which corporations graft themselves onto culture when genuine faith and magic collide with the commerce machine, and the exploitation through which it thrives. It’s a meat grinder built primarily to benefit men like David Falk and Phil Knight, and any windfall young Michael Jordans deserves in the world is secondary at best. Men with money arm themselves with noise and confidence as they grope in the dark trying to hook their wagons to someone doing something that will make the people of the world feel like they have faith again.

Air Ultimately, Falk condemns – at least as much as it is able to condemn anyone – by making the character of the story the film adapts almost entirely alien. It’s Sonny Vaccaro and Deloris Jordan, the film’s true believers, who move the needle, tying Nike’s corporate success to Michael Jordan’s incredible career. A massive asshole, Falk makes a great scapegoat, but he’s also an honest asshole; Deloris is the only character in the film who doesn’t try to take advantage of Michael. At the end of the day, they’re all assholes whose careers depend on people not knowing what they’re worth.

Air is in cinemas now.