Critics reviews

Even with a brief montage of Lenny's talent being squandered as he floats around the independent circuit and further into obscurity, the transition to the present is jarring. Physically, Lenny is hard to recognize today, yet there is still a record of grace in his puffy frame while playing a pickup game at a playground. As distant observers, the Safdie Brothers deliver the film's themes and characters' feelings in tender, subtle moments like this.

The format and subject matter might seem like an odd match for the Safdies, sibling filmmakers best known for making micro-indies (The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, Daddy Longlegs) and shorts about New York eccentrics. However, Lenny Cooke is less of an outlier than it initially seems. It shares with their fiction work a ragged visual sensibility, a bittersweet worldview, and a low-key, moment-to-moment approach to drama.

In the final segments, shot more recently and raggedly by the Safdies, Mr. Cooke is shown living in Stony Creek, Va., gone to seed but not alone. The camera wallows in the sight of the man getting happily drunk at his own birthday party, and the sequence crystallizes a certain lack of depth in the film, despite its knack for inducing slow, sad shakes of the head.

The great white hopes of today's microbudget-cinema ballers, the Safdies have always used a shambling, sloppy style... to their advantage, imbuing works about layabouts and losers like Daddy Long Legs (2009) with a form-meets-content aesthetic. That type of approach might not benefit a sports documentary, however, and though the brothers have created the polar opposite of a formulaic ESPN 30-for-30 episode, they don't chart Cooke's rise-and-fall arc in a way that lets you into his story.

The fallout and denouement after that fateful draft night makes up the final third of the film. The results are equally surprising and sometimes satisfying. And the last third of Lenny Cooke is exceptionally moving: in this section, the film emerges as a life lesson, not just a basketball documentary...

From the start, Cooke's quest—doomed by immaturity and irresponsibility, by big dreams that obscure immediate needs—is a low-key tragedy in the making... The filmmakers imbue the found footage with their own wistful voice—Cooke could be one of their fictional characters, and, with modest yet ingenious special effects, they make it so.

It's a spirited experiment in documentary form, with the directors showing great imagination in their fusion of new and archival footage and conveying a sharp dramatic sensibility in their portrait of Cooke, which they assemble largely from offhand moments. This reminded me at times of Dusan Makavejev's classic experimental documentary Innocence Unprotected (1968), which would make a good alternate title for the Safdies' cautionary tale.