One Man and His Shoes — how Michael Jordan became a logo
Despite orbiting the career of NBA legend Michael Jordan, the fascinating new documentary One Man and His Shoes is not about basketball. Or it is only as much as the sport slots into a wider lattice of money, culture, race, advertising, design and socio-economics. In short: everything else too. We do sometimes see Jordan on the court, a soaring, all-conquering man-machine. Even then, your eyes are somehow drawn — not by director Yemi Bamiro as much as the alchemy his film investigates — to his shoes, the Nike Air Jordans whose replicas would become a vast global business.
Kudos to Bamiro for covering this much ground in 83 minutes without leaving you hyperventilating. The detail is so rich, it feels strange not finding it extended over a multi-part Netflix series. Lean and snappy, much of the film can be taken as a neatly illustrated How To for anyone looking to build a multi-billion-dollar brand from the raw ingredients of, say, a scrappy manufacturer of running shoes (the early 1980s Nike) and a college basketball hopeful in Jordan.
For those taking notes, there are masterstrokes and happy accidents. With hindsight, crucial is the decision — credited to Jordan’s then manager — that Nike would relentlessly market him as an individual, rather than a mere representative of a team. The lucky break arrived with the NBA banning Jordan from wearing the first red and black iteration of the shoe in actual games — an offhand gesture of fusty conservatism that gave the new brand instant cool and the implied sense of competitive advantage. “Is it the shoes?” ran the tagline of another key puzzle piece, the groundbreaking advertising spots commissioned from then rookie director Spike Lee.
Such were the foundations. The headline 30 years on is a brand still thriving, as familiar as Coca-Cola. But the film is not a simple celebration — its arc is stranger and sadder than that. Between them, Lee, Jordan, Nike laid the ground for the vibrant “sneaker culture” now expressed in magazines and media, retro reissues and a lucrative collectors’ market. (The film finds one Parisian fan ecstatically sniffing the tissue paper inside an original shoebox.) More sombre is the hidden price of the success, a manic sense of must-have leading to teenage boys being killed for their shoes.
Bamiro doesn’t treat the violence as an afterthought. Time is spent with those touched by it and unpicking the reasons behind it. There are uneasy conclusions about the dark arts of supply and demand. And Jordan, immortalised as the “jumpman” graphic of the brand? It makes sense that he remains elusive, declining to be interviewed — the man who long ago transcended into a logo.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from October 23 and streaming in the UK from October 26