It’s always risky to mix sports metaphors, but it’s hard to resist the notion that the basketball-themed “More Than a Game” is a knockout of a sports documentary. Destined against its will to be known as “the LeBron James movie,” it is all that, and a good deal more.
James, of course, is one of the NBA’s most impressive players, someone so gifted that he was drafted in 2003 by the Cleveland Cavaliers right out of high school. Given that this film is coming out around the same time as his autobiography, “Shooting Stars,” it may sound like part of a calculated media blitz, but the film’s origins are considerably more complex.
“More Than a Game” has been in the works for quite some time, before most people outside of his home state of Ohio knew about James. Director Kristopher Belman, also from Ohio, was a 21-year- old graduate student at Loyola Marymount University when he heard about James and his teammates at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School and gradually wangled his way into being able to film the team at home and on the road during its junior and senior years.
Now, six years after that senior season, Belman has assembled a fascinating mixture of footage, including his own coverage, home movies shot by the team’s family members, extensive local TV reporting and candid contemporary interviews with James, his teammates and his St. Vincent coach Dru Joyce II, who starts the film by stating, “Basketball is a vehicle, not a be-all and end-all. Use basketball; don’t let it use you.”
As much as anything, “More Than a Game” is a sincere but unsentimental tribute to the value sports can have in people’s lives, how, with the help of the right adults, athletics can in a very real and tangible way rescue kids from dead- end adversity and give purpose and meaning to what they do. Really.
Also, because it is a quintessentially human activity, sports inevitably brings out the worst in people as well as the best, and “More Than a Game” doesn’t hesitate to show how the goodness can get perverted, how self-centeredness, ambition and money can tarnish everything they touch.
The tale begins years before high school, when Dru Joyce, motivated by the passion his son, invariably known as Little Dru, shows for basketball, agrees to coach a traveling youth team called the Shooting Stars.
Its core was four kids — his son, James, Willie McGee and Sian Cotton — who clicked on and off the court, kids who wanted to be family as much as they wanted to score points. This was especially true of James, who never knew his father and was born when his unwed mother was but 16.
In the team’s junior year, the sky fell on Akron. Sports Illustrated dubbed James “The Chosen One” and made him the first high school athlete to be on its cover in decades. All the resultant publicity went to the team’s head in a major way.
PG for brief mild language. 1 hour, 42 minutes. Directed by Kristopher Belman. Opens today at the Denver Pavilions.
