Movie Review: It’s Time for Some Game Theory In "High Flying Bird"

A sports agent and a #1 draft pick disrupt the NBA in the latest Steven Soderbergh heist flick.

For the second time in a row, Steven Soderbergh has made a movie on his iPhone, though this one, High Flying Bird, has gone direct-to-Netflix. In fact, Netflix even has a co-starring role.

During a fictional NBA lockout (when games—and pays—are halted until team owners can renegotiate terms with players and broadcasters), sports agent Ray Burke (André Holland) upends the status quo with his coveted rookie Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg) by threatening to take his one-on-one match-ups to, gasp, the very streaming service on which we’re watching High Flying Bird. Meta. (No, not that Metta.)

The goal, Burke says, is to cut out the middleman and return power to the players, suggesting there’s an unequal balance of profit to the NBA’s labour force. Throughout, screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney (of Moonlight) raises the spectre of slavery, though old school coach Spencer (Bill Duke) makes each of the characters atone with a little prayer whenever they bring it up. That includes the Players Association’s rep Myra (Sonja Sohn) and Ray's upwardly-mobile assistant Sam (Zazie Beetz). It's a very good cast.

High Flying Bird may sound like a socialist manifesto, but it’s not really, despite raising some fascinating and racially-pointed questions about post-capitalism, not to mention a sport we Australians love almost as much as the Americans.

Rather, High Flying Bird is a heist comedy in the classic Soderbergh mode (he is, after all, the director behind the Ocean’s franchise and Logan Lucky too). Holland, who is credited with "suggesting" the story to McCraney, is delectably sly as the fast-talking Ray, and as he plays four-dimensional chess to get Erick back in the news and on the court, we’re never quite sure who’s being grifted or how, until the very end. At one point, Holland seems to imperceptibly glimpse down the barrel of the camera, as if to let us in on the sting. Because this is Netflix, you can go back to see if you imagined it or if it was intentional. I could never quite tell. He was always one step ahead, even though I was the one armed with the remote.

The movie doesn’t remake the NBA or the model of moviemaking, though Soderbergh, at his fleetfooted best here, keeps trying the latter. (The iPhone cinematography—conducted by Soderbergh under a pseudonym, as usual—is thrillingly immediate, save for some lighting issues.) Instead, it works inside traditional and sometimes oppressive confines to get the job done smoothly, entertaining us hugely along the way. It’s also a basketball flick that only briefly shows us any basketball (and it’s just of Holland in a solo shootaround; he misses half the time).

Ultimately, High Flying Bird is a troll, like so many of the modern NBA greats. Actual players Reggie Jackson, Karl-Anthony Towns and Donovan Mitchell appear in interstitials to share their rookie stories. Surely Joel Embiid, the bomb-throwing social media Machiavelli, would have been a better fit?

4/5

High Flying Bird is now streaming on Netflix.