“Shooting Stars,” which chronicles the early life of basketball superstar LeBron James, begins in the hallowed halls of a community center basketball court.
As a person who played many seasons of city-league basketball as a kid, this space felt automatically familiar to me, and clearly demonstrates a level of familiarity on the part of the set designers. The fluorescent lighting, the pop-up bleachers, the constant squeak of basketball shoes, parents acting as scorekeepers seated on foldout chairs – it’s all so well done you can almost smell the sweat. Unfortunately, nothing else in the film quite rises to that level of artistry.
“Shooting Stars” follows the high school years of James and his best friends – Sian Cotton, Dru Joyce III, Willie McGee, and later Romeo Travis – chronicling how the teens led their high school basketball team to be number one in the country. This particular story in the LeBron James mythos has been told before, with the 2008 documentary “More Than a Game,” and the 2010 book “LeBron’s Dream Team,” on which this film is based. “Shooting Stars” feels like a largely unnecessary addition to the legend, not because it doesn’t add anything new to the story, but because the way it relitigates to us what we already know isn’t visually or narratively compelling.
The prowess of Ohio’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School basketball team while James attended is well-documented. But for a film about basketball, the actual basketball scenes are lackluster at best. Marquis “Mookie” Cook, the young actor who plays James, is a real life basketball player, and you would think the film would leap at the chance to show off his skill. But Mookie never really gets the chance to cook, so to speak. Instead, we’re privy to distracting editing choices, splitscreens, and camera shots of dunks filmed from below the basket – the backboard cutting off any view of where the action is actually taking place.
The problems with framing and direction extend to the film’s script as well. The movie bills itself as a story about this friend group, not just LeBron James. But we don’t end up in a place that treats each boy equally. Towards the tail end of the film, some tension is introduced into the story when a schism erupts between James and his friends after he shows up hungover to a big game. Here, the movie starts to tap into something interesting. No matter how close James and his friends still might be, it’s worth considering what sort of tensions arise when one friend is singled out for his talent on such a massive scale. But the film abandons this line of thought quickly, settling on a different point of contention in James’ high school years for its big climax – a suspension James received after he allegedly broke one of the state’s high school athletic association rules.
The choice to make James’ appeal to the association to let him play the climactic moment instead of his relationship with his friends feel antithetical to the thesis of the film. Cook, who was ostensibly chosen because of his prowess as a basketball player, clicks well with the rest of the cast, and the few moments where the boys are simply hanging out are some of the film’s most enjoyable. But Cook just doesn’t have the chops to handle a script that barely gives him anything to work with in the first place, and that lack of experience is most noticeable in the moments where he’s alone.
As far as narrative tension, the small break between James and his friends and the suspension drama are pretty much all we have to hang on to. The thing about this group that the film works hard to make sure you know is that they were ballers from day one. Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much room for them to grow. Early on in the group’s tenure on the high school team, a group of senior players gets sick of their cockiness and challenges them to a pick-up game. Mere moments later, the boys win with ease and we never hear any lip from those seniors again.
There are many moments like this throughout “Shooting Stars,” where conflict is introduced and then immediately scrubbed away a few scenes later. When Dru (Caleb McLaughlin) ignores his coach’s orders during a game, the team wins the game anyway. When LeBron’s girlfriend Savannah gets upset with him, she forgives him a few scenes later. Anything and everything that might cause tension or action is tied up with a nice bow as swiftly as possible, and the majority of the film’s runtime is devoted to showing us just what talented basketball players these kids were. That might be the truth of things, and that might have been a fun movie to watch – if the basketball scenes were any good, that is.