Lenny Cooke is to basketball as Anvil is to rock-n-roll, and like Anvil, he now has a documentary. A departure for filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie who’s previous features Daddy Longlegs (aka Go Get Some Rosemary) and The Pleasure of Being Robbed were incredible, unique portraits of New York City, warm and alive. Lenny Cooke is, in essence, a lo-res version of Hoop Dreams, a documentary in the making since 2001. The Safdies inherited this material and have crafted a documentary that shares some of the themes of regret and triumph in their previous work.

What we gain access to is Cooke coming into himself. For the first half hour I was unsure exactly what we were seeing — then again, I’m perhaps one of five people in the world that still don’t get Hoop Dreams (I think at 3-hours its awfully bloated, although I’ve since come to admire other documentaries by its filmmaker). Fourteen years after the hype, at one time Cooke was the top-ranked high school basketball players in the nation and he tells his friends “they made Lenny Cooke, everyone used to call me Leonard”.

Here’s where the film is most powerful: Lenny turned out to be a pretty nice guy (or we would like to believe, as the Safdie brothers include newly shot footage, including a party that works as a realistic portrait). He never had the problems some professional athletes had, perhaps because he never go to, and he was raised with a strong moral compass. The film works as a ground-level style doc, it’s not quite cinema verte, although the rough SD video with very little context apart from some onscreen explanatory titles provides an intimate view in a way a talking heads documentary, which might mix media, doesn’t. Paradoxically it’s what makes this film special and it’s also a flaw in its storytelling: we’re required to do a little more of the digging as the perspective is limited.

The SD video also locks us in time and place: an artifact of 9/11 era. It’s sharper than VHS media, but certainly not HD. The compositions are basic, yet grow until the images are sharp in HD. We’re in the moment when Lenny and friends first encounter the great LeBron James and declare he’s “legit.” The film’s use of a linear structure (spanning 12 years) is where it achieves the most power, including a moment when Lenny shares his life lessons with a kid, telling him “I know what its like to get $350,000 and go to Jacob the Jeweler.” He’s seen the high and lows and here’s a documentary that could be a real eye-opener for kids with dreams of becoming a professional athlete: good judgment and a back-up plan are essential.

Lenny Cooke is now screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. Check out a trailer below:

Grade: B+

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