LFF 2020: One Man and His Shoes
LFFCycles are the name of the game. Just a few months after The Last Dance garnered both critical and popular acclaim, we are graced with another documentary revolving around Michael Jordan, widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time. Whereas the aforementioned Netflix release focused on MJ’s professional exploits, One Man and His Shoes, the directorial debut from Yemi Bamiro, examines the cultural impact of his multi-billion-dollar shoe brand.
The Air Jordan has been a staple of the shoe industry since its first release in 1984, establishing Nike as a market superpower and boosting Jordan’s own stature as a player and icon. Bamiro initially takes a slightly sycophantic approach, briefly charting the player’s rise from college star to his stint with the Chicago Bulls. Unsurprisingly, the numerous talking heads, ranging from fans to university professors, speak in glowing terms, but One Man and His Shoes quickly moves through the gears to examine Nike’s ingenious and revolutionary marketing campaigns.
With snappy editing between interviews and archival footage, Bamiro can convey information effectively whilst never getting bogged down with too much jargon. Specific finances and manufacturing figures are rarely scrutinized, with the film being far more interested in how the shoe was conceived as a bridge between lower-class African Americans and elite-level athletes, a connective tissue between wildly different worlds.
A section devoted to Spike Lee, referencing both his filmography - including that line in Do The Right Thing - and his commercial work with Nike is particularly entertaining, showcasing the director’s irreverence from an early age. These commercials, filmed in the late 1980s, saw Lee featuring as Mars Blackmon, the Jordan-obsessed character from She’s Gotta Have It, are groundbreaking both in visual aesthetic and wit; for diehard fans, it’s undoubtedly a nice exercise in nostalgia, but for novices it’s interesting to see Lee’s work recontextualised.
From there, the film takes a sudden left-turn, scrutinizing both Nike’s exclusivity-oriented business model and Jordan’s own reluctance to partake in social activism. The company, after the initial increase in sales, inevitably upped the manufacturing rate, but this backfired when it created excess numbers. To remedy this, supply was shortened to increase the demand, not just an exercise in frugality but also in saving face. Though there is undoubtedly a case to be made, the film doesn’t do the necessary groundwork to justify its inclusion, with the lack of concrete figures making it feel like something of an afterthought.
The ramifications of this desirability becomes Bamiro’s main focus, whether it’s in hoarding or violent crime. The case of Joshua Woods, a 22-year-old murdered over the sneakers, is the centre piece of his thesis, but the shift in tone is far too jarring to fully resonate, feeling like an addendum to another story altogether. The intention, in all probability, is to juxtapose the vacuity of capitalism with the pressure it places on lower-classes, but the 83-minute runtime is too brisk for both angles to cohesively coalesce, leaving the film feeling breezy if a little slight and undeveloped. Akin to a game of basketball, One Man and His Shoes is frantic and enjoyable, but lacks the slam dunk of the famous Jumpman logo it attempts to unpick.