A DIFFERENT KIND OF UNDERDOG STORY IN 'AIR'

The new movie “ Air “ is technically about a shoe. There is nothing especially extraordinary about this shoe.

As the Q-like Nike designer Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) explains, the last significant change to footwear was made some 600 years ago when the decision was made to differentiate the right and left feet. The Air Jordan is, at the end of the day, just another shoe.

No one coos about how comfortable it is. No one waxes poetic about its performance-enhancing abilities or how many podiatrists recommend it for sporting purposes. No one even tries it on.

That’s because “Air,” directed by Ben Affleck from a smart script by Alex Convery, is not really about the shoe at all. Nor is it about Michael Jordan, who has exactly one line in the film and is mostly seen from behind and in silhouette. It is about the men – and they were all men – of Nike who defied the odds and signed the rookie despite being a very distant third to Adidas and Converse in the basketball sneaker game in 1984.

This is not a sports movie, however. If “Moneyball,” a spiritual cousin to “Air,” was baseball-adjacent, “Air” is about as far away from the game of basketball as one can get. The sport and romance of basketball in “Air” is almost completely beside the point, which is in some ways the most honest way for a couple of Gen-Xers to make a sincere movie about a corporate brand’s biggest success.