Producers Matt Damon and director Ben Affleck partner on screen again in AIR, a new film about the genesis of an iconic shoe brand that has maintained its staying power.

AIR tells a surprisingly fast-paced and tightly-written story about the origins of the global sneaker phenomenon Air Jordans. The highly-promising first release for Damon and Affleck’s production company Artists Equity boasts a remarkable supporting cast: Viola Davis and Julius Tennon co-star as Jordan’s parents, along with Chris Tucker, Marlon Wayons and Chris Messina in supporting roles. Damon provides the anchor for the lightness of AIR as Sonny Vaccaro, a basketball division executive who attempts to persuade rookie Michael Jordan into signing a sneaker deal with Nike in the early 1980s.

Vaccaro’s early insight into Jordan’s potential, Peter Moore (Matthe Maher) designing a now-ubiquitous shoe around the athlete’s likeness and marketing pitches with executive Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), are all confined to Nike offices, but the film is never suffocated by this almost-singular setting. 

AIR does not get bogged down in Nike background, though it does make several references to its rise to success. Vaccaro and Knight discuss “the old Nike days,” before it became a billion-dollar public corporation, when Knight was “selling sneakers out of the back of his car.” The viewer can’t help but draw comparisons to a time when Affleck and Damon first broke in as writers with their Academy Award-winning feature Good Will Hunting in 1994. Though of course the entertainment industry was plagued with problems back then, moviegoers were going to theaters to see new stories, long before streaming existed, when almost no motion pictures were based on existing IP or franchises.

The movie parallels Jordan’s rise as well as the filmmakers’, matching the stakes of a company embracing a do-or-die moment. The Knight character even discusses having to answer to the Nike board, leaders of a company banking on predictable outcomes. They’ll want a sure thing, and in 1984, Jordan had not yet played in the NBA. He was not a sure thing, and in an industry of stretched-thin superhero stories and video game offshoots, neither is AIR.

The parallels add a compelling layer to an already-interesting narrative, and screenwriter Alex Convery somehow carves a riveting movie out of a shoe’s inception. Though the real-life protagonists take a risk with Jordan, hoping it pays off, we all know how that ends. The push to get audiences back in theaters, and the role of AIR in making that happen, remains to be seen.