Lebron James. Kobe Bryant. Carmelo Anthony. Lenny Cooke.

In an alternate reality, these would all have been household names. For Lenny Cooke, unfortunately, this was not meant to be. It seems inconceivable that a man who can be mentioned in the same breath as these NBA titans never actually played against them as a member of the league. Talent, it appears, can only take you so far— the rest is up to luck, or the illusion of luck as sustained by making smart decisions and embracing the right opportunities. Such is the message of the 2013 documentary LENNY COOKE, the first nonfiction feature from directors Josh & Benny Safdie. 

The finished piece is raw and mostly unadorned, composed of two halves separated by a decade in between— a reflection of its unconventional, drawn-out production. The first half takes place in 2001, following a teenage Lenny Cooke: high school student, supremely gifted ball player, and already a father before achieving legal adulthood. He dreams of a future in the NBA, his fire fueled by the typical adolescent delusions of grandeur and invincibility, and the affirmations & assurances of greatness from every person in his life. Bolstered by the wave of high school students being drafted directly into the NBA, Lenny endeavors to do the same. His quest is captured on videotape by producer Adam Shopkorn, who originally set out to make a documentary about a basketball player’s journey from high school ball to the big leagues… only for the project to fizzle out when Lenny ultimately went unchosen and was forced to pivot to the minor leagues.

After the modest success of their 2009 feature DADDY LONGLEGS, the Safdies were approached by Shopkorn with an interesting proposal: supplement the existing footage with a new round of shooting that captures Lenny’s life a decade on from that fateful moment, thus completing the long-gestating documentary with an extended postscript that transforms a defining failure into a sobering statement on the long road one must embark on to overcome it. This is where LENNY COOKE fully becomes a Safdie Brothers film, with the brothers venturing out to exurban Virginia to find Lenny as a 30 year old man, still living the party life with the same group of guys he’s known since childhood… only now the party has turned stale. The buzz of youthful ambition has turned to the stink of alcohol on his breath, having gone soft much like the pudge that now clings to his once-limber frame.The dream is dead, but at least there’s still beer in the cooler.

LENNY COOK’s technical presentation reflects the extended length of its production, having occurred during the seismic, rapid advancements of the digital revolution. Framed in the native widescreen video aspect ratio of 1.78:1, the finished film is a case study in how far digital video advanced in just a few short years. The first half resolves its image with chunky pixels and saturated (but crude) color, interspersed with slightly-better looking archival footage from broadcast-quality video cameras. The second half improves on image clarity thanks to the advent of prosumer HD camcorders, which is better able to capture the micro expressions of disappointment that puncture adult Lenny’s cheerfulness as he rings in his thirties the only way he’s ever known. Both halves incorporate the observational “direct cinema” aesthetic pioneered by documentary filmmakers like DA Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, utilizing handheld camerawork marked by rack zooms and reactive pans and tilts to position us as an active participant in the story. Jazz and hip-hop play a prominent part in telling LENNY COOK’s story, the former serving as a sort of underscore throughout and the latter deploying rapper Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Part II” during the opening so as to drop us directly into Lenny’s world circa 2001. Other hip-hop tracks play diegetically on boomboxes and stereos, giving more flavor to the backdrop of Lenny’s life while leaving this particular viewer wondering how they could have possibly afforded all these needledrops on such a threadbare scale.

That LENNY COOKE adheres so closely to the Safdie signature despite their involvement coming so late in the game is a testament to the sheer strength of vision the brothers bring to their work. It helps that so much of Shopkorn’s early efforts fit neatly into their wheelhouse. Lenny’s origins in the Bushwick neighborhood of New York City and his all-consuming love of basketball are two naturally appealing factors for the brothers, who made their names out in the streets of Manhattan and would go on to make the sport a central component of their 2019 feature, UNCUT GEMS. The archival cameos from Kobe Bryant, Lebron James and Carmel Anthony also foreshadow Kevin Garnett’s substantial role in the same. The documentary format suits the brothers’ supernatural ability to coax compelling “performances” out of non-actors; Lenny and each member of his entourage are well-defined via the careful selection of coverage, and given added nuance by the opportunity to observe how they’ve grown and changed over a decade. 

Instead of following the feel-good, champion-against-all-odds format of most sports-focused entertainment, LENNY COOKE goes to great lengths to demonstrate the statistical pipe dream that is the NBA draft. Like so many other protagonists in the Safdie canon, the teenage Lenny grasps for an impossible dream, aided only by his natural talents, some meager resources, and just enough delusion to sustain him all the way to the draft. As a big fish in a small pond, he’s propped up by everyone around him as The Next Big Thing, only to unwittingly discover the true extent of his talent once he has his brush with the pros. One might see a tidy parallel to the art of filmmaking here; despite some advantages and privileges enjoyed by so few others, the Safdies nevertheless seem to be aware that their success is akin to winning the lottery. The luck of their draw is being able to connect with audiences in a way others can’t; there’s something inherently compelling about a character pursuing their version of the American Dream by any means necessary, because to embark on that kind of depiction is to reveal the fundamental inequities that shape our society. What does it say about us that some people have to resort to desperate measures to achieve some semblance of comfort? Obviously, LENNY COOKE does not dwell in that arena itself, but it does share a kindred spirit in going out of its way to deconstruct our national mythmaking with the hard realities of chasing impossible dreams. Sometimes we can’t achieve anything we set our mind to, and LENNY COOKE shows how the true failure lies in refusing to learn from our mistakes.

Despite being rooted entirely in the reality implied by consumer video and observational cinema, LENNY COOKE ends with a fantastical flourish that only the Safdies could devise. In a climactic sequence that plays more like a sober version of THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED’s handmade polar bear costume interaction or DADDY LONGLEG’s giant janky spider nightmare scene, we return to the scene of a teenage Lenny at basketball training camp— only, the Safdies have seen fit to digitally insert 30 year-old Lenny into the archival footage. Fulfilling a fantasy that we all have harbored at some point, Older Lenny talks directly to his younger self, admonishing him for his ego and advising him on sensible actions he could take to preserve his future. The seams of the digital effect itself are evident, but what’s surprising is how well it folds into the archival footage; there’s a moment where the cameraman moves the camera and recomposes the frame while still recording, which very well may not have existed in the original footage. It’s a subtle, small technique, but it’s also an inspired stroke that fully sells the audience on the illusion.

As a true documentary in a body of work that operates using much of the same visual grammar, LENNY COOKE is a fascinating curio in the Safdies’ development— especially when considering its general unavailability. The same digital ephemerality that gives the film its sense of present-tense immediacy is, in a funny way, its own undoing; without a significant cultural footprint it has found itself buried by the algorithm, to the point that its previous platform, Amazon Prime Video, unceremoniously yanked it off the server because of unsatisfactory numbers. If you can find it, you might discover a sobering portrait of the great American sports-entertainment-industrial complex; a machine powered by big dreams that produces just a few perfectly-molded prototypes while spitting out far more waste in the form of dashed hopes & disappointment. In the hands of a filmmaker more-oriented towards the mainstream, we might get a broader documentary that examines the subject at the institutional level, but the Safdies’ and Shopkorn’s focus on the personal and the individual is arguably the superior choice. The end result is a highly relatable piece that people from all disciplines and ambitions can draw important conclusions from.

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