Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan is an actor, born 1963.
There is no acting career here and Jordan has never claimed one. Fifteen NBA seasons between 1984 and 2003, six championships with the Chicago Bulls, and a central part in exporting basketball to the rest of the world through the 1980s and 1990s: that is the career, and every screen credit here is downstream of it.
Space Jam is the anomaly, a live-action and animation hybrid that asked him to carry a feature opposite Bugs Bunny. He is stiff in it, and it does not matter, because the film understands that his job is to be the fixed point everything cartoonish bounces off. He is credited as himself in He Got Game as well, and appears as himself in a Michael Jackson video compilation, a Chris Farley tribute and a stack of documentaries.
The Last Dance is the real text. Ten episodes assembled largely from footage shot during his final Bulls season, it is the closest thing to his own account of himself: competitive to the point of unpleasantness, unsentimental about teammates, still visibly irritated by thirty-year-old grievances. Read his book Driven From Within alongside it and you get the same voice in two registers. Since retiring he has been an NBA team owner and a businessman, which he approaches the way he approached everything else.
Movies (8)
TV (3)
Books (1)
Where to start with Michael Jordan
The Last Dance first, and there is no argument to have. Ten episodes, a mountain of unseen 1998 footage, and a portrait that is admiring and slightly appalled at once. It works even if basketball means nothing to you, because the real subject is what winning costs the people standing nearby.
Space Jam is the childhood one, and it holds up better than the sequel it eventually spawned. Watch it for the Looney Tunes and for the strangeness of a global superstar playing an unreadable straight man.
After that, They Call Me Magic and Basketball: A Love Story fill in the era around him, and The Redeem Team covers the 2008 Olympic squad, where he turns up in archive form. His book Driven from within is the only item here in his own voice, and He Got Game is a Spike Lee film worth your time on its own merits.