Basketball Movie Review
High Flying Bird
A rookie, an agent and an NBA lockout turn player power into the actual game, with contracts, phones and attention replacing the scoreboard.
Barely any game action, heaps of basketball. It treats ownership, labour and distribution like the real fourth quarter — fascinating, talky and deliberately not for everybody.
Movie details
2019 · 1h 31m · Drama
Director Steven Soderbergh
- André Holland
- Melvin Gregg
- Zazie Beetz
- Bill Duke
- Steven Soderbergh shot High Flying Bird on iPhone 8 Plus cameras in a production that lasted only 13 days.
- Real NBA players Reggie Jackson, Karl-Anthony Towns and Donovan Mitchell appear as themselves discussing the league experience.
01
The Take
High Flying Bird asks a nastier question than most sports movies: if the players are the product, why do they need the existing machine to sell the product? During a fictional lockout, every phone, contract and viral clip becomes leverage. The movie has Moneyball energy aimed at labour rather than roster construction, and it trusts the audience to keep up with the business argument.
02
Does the Basketball Hold Up?
The lack of traditional game footage is the point. This is basketball as an ecosystem: rookie contracts, agents, owners, media, lockouts, player-controlled attention and the fight over who gets paid when everybody already knows where the value lives. The actual basketball appears as proof of concept rather than spectacle.
03
Best Basketball Moment
The viral one-on-one between Erick Scott and Jamero Umber. A simple run becomes distribution, marketing and leverage in real time — exactly the thesis of the movie compressed into a few possessions.
04
Ball Cred
Real NBA players discuss their own experiences, while the script understands collective bargaining and player branding well enough to make a lockout feel like basketball rather than legal homework.