Documentaries in this day and age, especially the ones done with full cooperation and involvement of the subject, can be way too whitewashed to be of any value. Not that we necessarily want to know every bad thing someone has said or done but when serious transgressions that may have lead to arrests or worse are breezed through as if they are traffic violations then that doesn’t serve us either. At the same time it isn’t much better when the film acts like a vehicle to get it’s creator over at the expense of the subject. Finding that sweet spot between hagiography and deliberately unflattering is crucial; I want to feel as if the person I’m being presented is the actual person and not a movie character based on what someone wants us to think this person is, which is the lane that most biopics have fallen into today. I feel like they got that here.
Iv3rson focuses a lot more on Allen Iverson, the man from Hampton/Newport News who played for Bethel High School than the Allen Iverson that we saw on TV in the NBA. Instead of interviews with his contemporaries (Shaquille O’Neal was the only one who had a major onscreen presence in the film), it spent lots of time with his parents, his wife Tawanna, other family members, and other friends and neighbors from where he grew up. Now no doubt a big reason for all those absences is that Iverson and Shaq are Reebok VPs and so many of the league’s stars are Nike guys, but it was for the better! Featuring them and having them talk about their lives with him and what role they played and what he meant to them did a better job of connecting us to him than having a roll call of current and former NBA players gush about how great he was. Iverson was often criticized for his never waning loyalty to his friends and family back home, but hearing from some of those actual people really put it into perspective. For all intents and purposes Allen Iverson rode with the people who supported him, and those people supported him through some really rough circumstances while he was growing up. Were those people being opportunistic, trading early support for his in the future once he’d made it? Maybe, but they all put real skin in the game on the front end made plenty of sacrifices of their own to help Allen get to where he is and continued to stick with him when things weren’t going so great late in his career.
Focusing so much on Iverson the man, for better or worse, meant less focus on his NBA career. We start with Allen on draft day and some early interview footage where he said the usual player-speak about wanting to get better and all. But the early struggles to put a winning team around him were glossed over. Former Sixers Owner and President Pat Croce was featured a good bit in the second episode, and was great to hear from. Croce was front and center for Iverson’s clashes with Larry Brown and gave his own first hand account of forcing them to work together, which ultimately lead to an NBA Finals appearance. That playoff run got the most focus of any point of his career, and rightfully so given that it was the pinnacle of his career. And then the rest of his career – the decline of the Sixers finals roster and getting traded four times in four years before retiring where it started in Philly, came and went very fast. Iverson played nine seasons after the 2001 Finals, five with the Sixers, and they got what felt like five minutes of screen time here. If you came in expecting Michael Jordan: Come Fly With Me or Magic Johnson: Always Showtime then you would likely be disappointed by the relative lack of attention his on court life got here.
That being said, the mission of this film was to show us Allen the man. So while his post Finals career struggles were glossed over, the parallel spiral in his personal life filled in the gap. The killing of his best friend Rahshaan Langford was given a good bit of discussion, and how it put him in a bad place that would lead to a lot of self destructive behavior. While we didn’t get a point by point recounting of all his incidents enough was shown for us to see he was not on a good path as his career wound down. His divorce from Tawanna, who he would later remarry, happened during this time and if there’s a part of the documentary that can be accused of sanitizing things it’s here. Iverson’s infidelity wasn’t mentioned at all and instead the whole thing was lumped in as it their marriage was a casualty of his late career struggles and his grief over Langord’s death.
There is one big thing missing from this – the presence of Big John, Coach John Thompson from Georgetown. John passed away in 2020, so unfortunately he wasn’t there to provide his perspective on his time with Allen. The documentary was very light on Allen’s two years at Georgetown, and understandably so since the most important figure of that time is no longer with us. Iverson credits John with saving his life, and Coach was a big figure in his life until he passed, and his absence was really felt. We got zero insight into how life was at Georgetown for Allen, which has the makings of a fascinating study. Iverson extended the Hoyas time at the top of the Big East for two more years while being the furthest thing from fitting the profile of any other player Thompson had ever brought in. But without Big John to speak on it we’ll probably never get any real insight into how it was there at the time. Former NBA Commissioner David Stern, who also is no longer with us, appeared in some old taped interviews and would have also been great to have heard from given his well publicized clashes with Iverson throughout his career. The brief mention of Iverson’s ill fated rap album could have been fleshed out, although Iverson’s recounting of meeting with Stern about it was pretty amusing in it’s own right.
Final Verdict
I liked it. I felt that more than anything it connected you to who Allen Iverson is. Iverson has an autobiography out, rightfully titled Misunderstood, and this feels as if this may be a short version of that because at the end I felt like I, well, understood him more. It did paint him in a really positive light overall, a man whose only sin is that he does everything at 11, but Allen is always willing and ready to admit when he did something wrong or made a mistake. He doesn’t pass the buck or blame anyone else for his missteps. At only three episodes long it felt like there was a lot more story to tell, but maybe that’s what the book is for. All in all, it’s worth your time if you’re a Prime subscriber.
Stroke of Genius 