LeBron James transcends his reign as a member of any one of the several NBA teams he’s played in. He’s a mammoth cultural icon, his own towering piece of American iconography. This is the man that has won four NBA championships, four MVP awards and two Olympic gold medals, and who is now a frequent producer of sports films and documentaries, a regular figure in TV spots and commercials, and one who had the absolute reckless audacity to star in Space Jam: A New Legacy. Where do you start recounting the origin story of such a man?
The best place would probably be his own book. In 2009, he and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger released Shooting Stars, a nonfiction account of James’ experience growing up in Akron, and how he and his closest friends—making up their own “Fab 5”—modeled and designed their life around basketball together, leading them all the way to a national championship during their senior year of high school and kickstarting each of their own individual careers. It is very much the story of James’ ascension to basketball stardom, but it’s also the story of Willie McGee, Dru Joyce III, Sian Cotton and Romeo Travis, and how this group cultivated their own committed alliance to each other within the reality of growing up relatively poor in middle America.
It’s a broadly captivating conceit, and one ripe with potential for making a good nuts-and-bolts underdog sports movie—as long as it was made with enough filmmaking aptitude. But director Chris Robinson’s go at Shooting Stars doesn’t reach the heights of its genre’s potential, but it’s not a completely blank slate either. It sits somewhere right in the middle of both worlds: You can feel the inspired approach to the material at a basic craft level, but it’s also never particularly surprising that it went straight to streaming on Peacock.
Working from a script by Frank E. Flowers, Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor (the latter two of whom have writing credits on the aforementioned Space Jam), Shooting Stars has an admirably grounded approach to the story of a cultural legend. It largely plays like a coming-of-age sports movie with the knowledge of who James would become simmering underneath the surface. His being a prodigy is an implicit part of the story, but this acts in contrast to something like Air, where the persona of Michael Jordan was so mythical that his face is never even on camera. It seeks to humanize James in a way that can often be endearing—watching him and his buddies shoot the shit while playing video games in a basement adorned with Apollo 13 and Child’s Play 2 posters (there’s a lot of great ‘90s period detail here) does a lot to establish a charming likability to this group of friends.
This works despite some occasionally wooden performances that struggle to bring the script to life. Marquis “Mookie” Cook, a talented basketball player in his own right making his acting debut as James, gets the physicality down and bears an uncanny resemblance but, maybe predictably, never quite evokes the ever-so-marketable magnetism of his subject. Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin, meanwhile, pulls his weight just enough as Joyce, acting as the heart of the story in many ways. He’s the catalyst for the group deciding to go to the local, white, religious high school so they could all play together, and the one who gets caught between James and his own father (Dru Joyce II, their eventual coach), who recognizes that James’ impending celebrity isn’t necessarily in the cards for his own son. McLaughlin works to bring the drama down to earth as the most capable performer of the group, offering a grounded perspective for us to latch onto.
Compelling dynamics like that are established throughout the film—another being a general local animosity from the Black community toward the boys and their families for their choice of schooling—but are never explored deep enough to make a lasting impression. The script gets caught up in the lethargy of routine narrative beats, and the true story that was perhaps more engrossing on the page doesn’t end up satisfying. Dermot Mulroney’s character (Keith Dambrot, the kids’ initial high school coach who got rejected from college ball), ends up drifting in and out of the story in a way that, even if true to life, doesn’t make a lot of dramatic sense.
Robinson and cinematographer Karsten Gopinath make a genuine effort to give Shooting Stars a more interesting visual style than you would expect, with the use of drone shots, dutch angles, fourth-wall breaks, chapter breaks, on-screen title cards and graphics, and a brief opening prologue presented in a lovely 4:3 frame. But there’s something missing if the adaptation was to exceed both its biopic and sports movie trappings: Where autobiography offers a much more intimate psychological and emotional connection to someone so much larger than life, transitioning it to the screen makes for something that can’t help but feel more like a perfunctory reenactment. Shooting Stars has its moments, but I have to imagine this was more memorable as prose than as training montage.
Directors: Chris Robinson
Writers: Frank E. Flowers, Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor
Starring: Wood Harris, Marquis “Mookie” Cook, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalie Paul, Algee Smith, Dermot Mulroney, Khalil Everage, Sterling “Scoot” Henderson, Katlyn Nichol, Avery S. Wills, Jr.
Release Date: June 2, 2023 (Peacock)
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.