ABSTRACT
From the poetic opening scenes of a cross-section of American children (boys and girls, country and city, black and white) playing basketball in schools and on playgrounds, He Got Game offers Spike Lee’s deeply personal and intense vision of contemporary basketball. All of the potential clichés surrounding the all-too-familiar battle between white college recruiters and professional sports agents for the opportunity to exploit the black high school superstar are submerged beneath a powerful story of father and son reconciliation. Jesus Shuttlesworth (NBA star Ray Allen) has to choose between two lucrative basketball futures, while at the same time struggling with the question of forgiving an absent father (Denzel Washington). The film also highlights an adolescent struggling to create an adult identity, and recreate an athletic identity. The hypocritical and mercenary nature of the battle for Jesus’s basketball services is vivid and realistic, while the poignancy of the story of family life in the inner city is refreshingly authentic and free of stereotypes. He Got Game is a wonderful dramatic companion piece to either Hoop Dreams (1995) or Hardwood Dreams (see below). The striking stylistic similarities of the opening montage with Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) will offer students a powerful image of two very different Americas.
