‘Shooting Stars’ Review: Brotherly Love and Basketball

Knowing that each inch of LeBron James’s life and profession has been lined by the media up to now, it could be exhausting to justify “Shooting Stars,” a movie targeted not precisely on James’s rise as a phenom however as a substitute on his highschool squad. The film is in essence an adaptation not solely of a memoir of the identical identify (written by James and the journalist Buzz Bissinger, and launched in 2009), but additionally of one other movie, the 2009 documentary “More Than a Game.”

Yet for what it units out to do, detailing the bond of younger boys below surreal circumstances, “Shooting Stars” is a comparatively sturdy retelling. Directed by Chris Robinson, the film tracks the story of James and his childhood associates, a.ok.a the Fab Five, over 4 years as they conquer the highschool basketball panorama and reckon with the problems of a rising highlight.

Remarkably, the drama is buoyed much less by the implicit understanding of who James went on to turn out to be than by the younger actors, who share an infectious chemistry. (It helps that all of them seem like really good at basketball.)

The star is Marquis Cook, often known as Mookie, an precise highschool basketball recruit who naturally embodies a younger LeBron — the boyish shyness nestled inside messianic potential — seemingly as a result of he’s, as a younger star, experiencing a model of what James did.

Shooting Stars
Rated PG-13 for robust language, some suggestive references and teenage ingesting. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Peacock.