'Lenny Cooke' documentary follows basketball hopeful's road to defeat

1/5

The life story of Nelson Mandela - a powerful tale of a charismatic lawyer and human rights activist working to dismantle apartheid, only to land in prison for 27 years and ultimately become country’s first democratically elected president - has been told time and time again. Most recently, British star Idris Elba portrays the anti-apartheid figure on screen. Click through to see a sampling of actors who’ve depicted the revolutionary in film.

By Christy Khoshaba (Debbi Yazbek / AFP / Getty Images)

2/5

The narrative: In his first term as the South African President, Nelson Mandela uses the nation’s appetite for sports as a pivot point to unite the apartheid-torn land. He enlists the national rugby team - a group and sport many black South Africans once perceived as the game of their oppressors - to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The result electrifies South Africa with what Mandela calls its moment of greatness.

Actor’s push: At a 1994 press conference for Mandela’s memoir “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela appointed Morgan Freeman as the actor to portray him in film. “It sounds arrogant,” Freeman said, “but my thinking was, ‘Of course. Who else? and I can do it.”

Director’s pull: “Morgan is great,” said the film’s director Clint Eastwood of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Million Dollar Baby.” “I could not imagine anyone else in the role of Mandela. They have the same stature and same kind of charismatic nature. Morgan also has a similar vocal quality, and he worked very hard to capture Mandela’s inflections. I think he did it quite well.”

Did he meet Mr. Mandela? Very much so. Freeman spent time with Mandela to replicate the way he walked and talked. The pair eventually sat down to watch the film together. “I was sitting right next to him,” Freeman said. “He pointed at the screen and said ‘I know that fella.’ So, yeah, I think he liked it.” (Keith Bernstein / AP)

3/5

The narrative: Based on the memoirs written by James Gregory, who was the censor officer and prison guard to Nelson Mandela, the film recounts the intense effect Mandela had on the white South African guard, and the relationship the pair developed during Mandela’s 18-year stay in prison on Robben Island, before he moved to Pollsmoor Prison.

Actor’s push: Haysbert admitted the role was “daunting” and “intimidating.” “Every night I went home, I would have a glass of wine and just cry,” he said. “The sacrifices he made were profoundly sad to me.”

Director’s pull: “I had to find an actor who has his size and [is of] the same age as Mandela,” said the film’s director Billie August of “The House of Spirits” and “Les Miserables.” “The choice of Dennis Haysbert seemed obvious. I had spotted him in the series “24.” (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

4/5

The narrative: The film tells the tale of Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie Mandela, and her tumultuous outing from a shy country girl to a dogged revolutionary, as the world watched her relationship with her husband transform.

Actor’s push: “I was terrified,” said David Harewood. “Then I started doing my research. And the more I read, the more I understood that he’s a man, a very vulnerable man, a man in love, a man who was incredibly strong and intelligent.” (Jeff Vespa / WireImage)

5/5

The narrative: Honing in on the final days of apartheid in South Africa, the film brings to light the secret high-risk talks and negotiations held between the African National Congress and the Afrikaner National Party in an English country house, which brought an end to apartheid and led the release of Nelson Mandela.

Actor’s push: “For years I didn’t eat South African food,”Peters said. “I didn’t go to South Africa when I was invited there. I was counting on the whole world to bring pressure to bear to help end apartheid.” When Clarke was offered the role, he likened it something of royal stature. “I was absolutely overawed. Wouldn¿t you be? How would you like to play the Queen?”

Director’s pull: “What really struck me is that it’s a story about now,” said the film’s director Pete Travis of “Vantage Point”and “Dredd.” “Seemingly intractable political situations transformed by seemingly impossible things, like people having hope. That’s the story that feels totally about today to me.”

Did he meet Mr. Mandela? Peters met Mandela’s inmate on Robben Island, who told him when Mandela heard his son died, he stood at his cell window for four days, avoiding human contact and food. “When he turned away from the window he was a changed man,” said Peters. “I think he was having a very deep conversation with God - that God imbued him with that extra bit of wisdom, that extra bit of patience.” (Larry Busacca / Getty Images)

By Mark Olsen

Dec. 7, 2013 9 AM PT

As unlikely as it seems, failure and obscurity can have rewards of their own. The new documentary “Lenny Cooke” follows its titular subject on the road to defeat. Or rather, the film explores how defeat can nevertheless lead to a triumphant confirmation of self.

The film, opening Dec. 13 in Los Angeles, chronicles the story of Lenny Cooke, a New York City basketball prodigy who in the early 2000s was ranked as the No. 1 high school basketball player in America. A drift of miscalculations, bad representation and fatefully bad decisions curtailed Cooke’s professional basketball career before it had even really begun. After declaring himself eligible for the 2002 NBA draft, he was passed over, falling into an obscure series of lesser-known teams and leagues in the U.S. and abroad.

The current “Inside Llewyn Davis,” in which the musician of the title is shown as his own worst enemy, was created whole-cloth by Joel and Ethan Coen, and it took another pair of movie-making siblings to bring Cooke’s story to the screen. New York City filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie had never made a documentary before, and yet the indefinable appeal of Cooke fit neatly alongside the central characters of their eccentric fiction works, the ragamuffin scamp thief in “The Pleasure of Being Robbed” and the ill-equipped father of the semi-autobiographical “Daddy Longlegs.”

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By turns charming, moody, electrifying and distant, Cooke is such an inscrutable character that it can seem as if the Safdies wrote him themselves. Structured chronologically, the film moves from grainy, outdated video formats to sleeker-looking contemporary footage, giving viewers both a sense of Cooke’s world while also leaving him a teasing enigma. It builds to a moment of unexpected grace, via some unconventional movie trickery.

“We love basketball, but we didn’t want to just make a standard boilerplate film that’s so easily centered around the sports aspect,” said Benny Safdie, 27. “And we realized, ‘OK, there is something else here, there is something outside of that world.’ It was off the court. You could see why he didn’t make it, not so much because of his basketball skills but in his personality and approach.”

“Here was somebody who was not a good basketball player, but the best. ... He could say he was the best at one point in his life,” said Josh Safdie, 29, on the phone with his brother. “He has the ultimate perspective on life, he’s been on top, the bottom and everywhere in between.”

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The project got its start in 2001 when Adam Shopkorn, then an aspiring filmmaker in his early 20s, wanted to explore the burgeoning phenomenon of high school players going straight to the NBA, leapfrogging their collegiate careers for a high-pressure world of multimillion-dollar contracts. (Shopkorn, credited as producer on the finished film, now works as an art dealer and curator.) It was then he began shooting with Cooke, following him on what seemed a sure-fire journey straight to the pros.

“I thought it would be really interesting to document that process over a two-year period. I was looking at it like I was going to find a guy who was going to do it successfully,” said Shopkorn, now 35. “And I wound up not having that guy.”

Cooke moved from Bushwick in Brooklyn to play for a high school in New Jersey before decamping for a time to Michigan. After Cooke wasn’t drafted into the NBA in 2002, he and Shopkorn fell out of touch and ( Shopkorn put the footage into a shoebox.

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Having known the Safdies since childhood, he told them about the thwarted project after attending a 2010 “Daddy Longlegs” screening in New York. The brothers knew of Cooke’s story and, after giving the footage a look, they were intrigued. The trio reconnected with Cooke and picked up his story from there.

In a sense the Safdies got to meet Cooke twice, once through Shopkorn’s original footage and then again when they all met him in person. “We watched all of this footage and really got to know him,” Josh Safdie said. “And then we see him for the first time, and it was almost like I was meeting a parable.”

Cooke, now 31, lives in Virginia not far from Richmond. With his playing days behind him, he most recently has been doing some coaching and speaking to youth groups about his story. There have been years of struggle, and the footage captured by the Safdies with Shopkorn in more recent years finds him transitioning between ruminative anger and a hard-won equilibrium. In a scene at his 30th birthday party, Cooke wavers between playfulness and breaking down in tears.

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Chicago Bulls star Joakim Noah, credited as executive producer on the film, recently attended a screening in Chicago, as did Jahlil Okafor, currently considered the best high school basketball player in the country. Noah and Okafor were photographed alongside Cooke, and it is for a younger generation of student athletes that Cooke hopes the film has a cautionary effect.

“I don’t have any regrets,” Cooke said on the phone, “because of the simple fact that the decisions I made and the things I did, I did those things because I wanted to do them. I didn’t do it because anybody pushed me to do anything. I made all of my choices on my own.”

The film builds to an astonishing moment when, through crafty editing and shooting Cooke in front of a green screen, he is allowed to speak directly to his younger self.

“We didn’t want to impose ourselves on the story, and it’s weird that the result of that is this crazy special effect which is kind of the ultimate imposition on the film,” Benny Safdie said. “But it doesn’t feel like that, it feels like, of course, he can go back and talk to himself.”

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“We wanted the movie to be from Lenny’s perspective,” Josh Safdie said. “We didn’t want to tell you why we think he did what he did. So we had him tell us.”

For Cooke, shooting the scene was a deeply emotional moment, the likes of which he had never experienced before. “Those things I say now, I never said that to myself,” Cooke said. “Looking back on it, I’m able to explain to these kids now the things that I didn’t have explained to me when I was 16, 17, 18 years old.”

The scene takes the film to the place the Safdies ultimately wanted it to go, giving a deeper meaning to Cooke’s travails and finding a resolution that uses the past to look ahead.

The moral of Cooke’s story, if there is one, is bigger than any single game or moment. As Cooke himself says, his story is about “not just basketball but life in general.”

mark.olsen@latimes.com

‘Lenny Cooke’ documentary follows basketball hopeful’s road to defeat

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