Lenny Cooke

Runs Fri., Nov. 29–Thurs., Dec. 5 
at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 90 minutes.

The less you remember about Lenny Cooke going into this doc, the faster his tragedy sets in. At the beginning of the film, circa 2001, Cooke seems destined to be an NBA star, ranked nationally as a high schooler above LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony. (Yes, such prep rankings exist, and are very competitive.) With a film crew already following his story, it’s Cooke who can beckon Anthony from across the room to join him during national exhibitions, with Melo dutifully complying. Meanwhile, with more high-school seniors going directly into the NBA, we see Cooke seduced by the draw of skipping college and heading straight toward pro ball.

Cooke would become a poster child for what can go wrong when high-school kids go into the NBA draft, which the league banned in 2006. However, this documentary is strongest not when probing such rules but when flexing the access filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie got to Cooke—both in his promising prime and devastating decline. Fair warning: If you’re suffering from seasonal affective disorder right now, you’d best avoid the brutal footage of Cooke’s 30th-birthday party.

With its sparse narration, the film has a frustrating habit of raising questions the Safdie brothers make no attempt to answer. In high school, Cooke leaves Brooklyn to live with a wealthy white woman in New Jersey who has the means to fly him to basketball exhibitions on a private jet. (“I’ve never had to show ID to get on a plane!” an exasperated Cooke later tells a teammate who’s puzzled by how he got to Las Vegas without a driver’s license.) How this arrangement came to be goes almost completely unexplained. There are also references to agents paying Cooke hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue the NBA, but once again the details—vital to telling the bigger story of how NBA dreams can ruin young men—remain vague.

Still, Cooke’s story is an important corrective to all the tales of adversity overcome that are common this time of year. Sometimes things don’t work out; sometimes the guy you’re rooting for doesn’t win. And when the lights go out, life goes on. Just make sure you have plenty of antidepressants at the ready.

dperson@seattleweekly.com