A Cocky Kid's Dream Crumbles in Sobering 'Lenny Cooke' Film

What's This?

By Sam Laird2013-12-19 01:30:32 UTC

Before YouTube provided endless mixtapes of teenage basketball stars, before LeBron James changed amateur basketball forever to fuel a 24/7 appetite for online updates on hot prospects, Lenny Cooke was basketball's next big thing.

Cooke, a 6-foot-6-inch swingman out of Brooklyn, was the nation's top player, seemingly on the fast track to NBA fame and riches. But he never made it.

See also: A YouTube Legend Battles for His Basketball Future

That disconnect is the subject of Lenny Cooke, a powerful documentary exploring the dark reality of prodigious promise gone unfulfilled.

Seeing a bloated Cooke rationalize his basketball demise is sobering indeed after watching him confidently interact with future NBA stars including James and Carmelo Anthony as a teen. The film is aided tremendously by the fact that directors Ben and Joshua Safdie are able to use prime footage of Cooke as a high schooler that was shot by Adam Shopkorn in the early 2000s for a never-completed documentary about the young star.

That old footage provides a fascinating, surreal and sometimes disturbing window into Cooke's life as a basketball prodigy. We see him treat future NBA stars as peers or younger brothers. (One of his old friends, Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls, produced Lenny Cooke.) We see the eye-popping skills that built his reputation. We see the tough neighborhood where he grew up and the white suburban mom with whom he lived with in his late teens. But we also see him sullenly brush off coaches' advice and party like an adult while in Las Vegas for a tournament.

The trove of old content makes the film's final 25 minutes all the more powerful. Cooke throws himself a 30th birthday party, ending the night on the couch drunkenly scooping food into his mouth in front of the TV. He briefly reunites with Noah and other players on the Madison Square Garden floor after a recent New York Knicks game, an encounter that contrasts Cooke's current circumstance with what might have been. And an emotional argument with friends he rarely sees anymore is a painful reminder of how much has changed since they were all cocky teenagers.

Lenny Cooke's one glaring hole is the narrative gap between his promising younger years and current reality. Short clips of him playing in lowly minor leagues speed the timeline along, but the film never digs into what exactly happened during that decade — the why of his cautionary tale. Was he simply overhyped? Did his skills not develop as expected? Or was Cooke handicapped by personal issues?

To hear Cooke tell it late in the film, he just never had a passion for the game. Under-the-table payments and stardom's accompanying fast life, however, meant he couldn't stay away. Whether that's revisionist history on his part or the simple truth, the rest of us will never know. But as an overweight Cooke says of his fans, handlers and enablers: "They made me this person. That fucked me up."

That's something to keep in mind next time highlights of basketball's next underage phenom pop up on YouTube.

Image: Lenny Cooke film

Topics: Entertainment, Film, NBA, reviews, Sports