Welcome to the commodity biopic

“A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it,” Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis) says in a pivotal scene in Air (directed by Ben Affleck). She is repeating back to Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) a line he used in a rousing corporate pitch to convince Deloris’s son Michael (yes, that Michael Jordan) to sign a shoe deal with Nike. Deloris and Sonny are the only two believers in Michael’s superstar potential. We’re supposed to see that they want what’s best for him, while everyone else is just another corporate stooge trying to profit off a Black man’s excellence.

Except, of course, that Sonny is also a corporate middleman trying to save the struggling basketball wing of what was then predominately a running shoe company, and Deloris is using Sonny’s own line as bait to lure him into an unprecedented deal that would give her son royalty rights on every pair of shoes sold.

Welcome to the sleight of hand of the commodity biopic: movies about the origin stories of influential objects that shape our contemporary consumer landscape. Air was released within months of similar movies about the invention of the video game Tetris (Tetris, directed by Jon Baird); the smartphone that paved the way for the iPhone that then replaced it almost overnight (BlackBerry, directed by Matt Johnson); and the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto (Flamin’ Hot, directed by Eva Longoria).