Colin Sheridan: Spike Lee’s flick still has Game 25 years on

In the pantheon of great sports movies, He Got Game is largely forgotten. Raging Bull had Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci mid-pomp. Any Given Sunday had Oliver Stone, an infinite budget and that speech from Pacino

REUNITED: Stars of He Got Game, actor Denzel Washington and Ray Allen of the Seattle SuperSonics, chat before the LA Lakers host the SuperSonics in February 2003 at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. Pic: Vince Bucci/Getty Images

The opening credits of Spike Lee’s He Got Game —released 25 years ago this month — reveal a sweeping canvas of faces and bodies all dancing the dance of a wannabe superstar, basketball in hand and Air Jordans on feet. Kids across America - black and white, tall and small - ducking and weaving, dribbling and dunking, executing crossovers against invisible opponents and shooting perfect pull-up jumpers in empty farm yards. Polished hardcourts on Venice Beach, netless rims on broken backboards, floodlit pick-up games in the projects, scored - not, as you’d expect to the ubiquitous hip-hop of the time - but to contemporary classical music, oddly apposite given the cinematic parallels of the America Lee wants us to see - part Grapes of Wrath, part  Boyz n’ the Hood . 

It’s a jarring opening sequence — the vast dustbowl of middle-America juxtaposed against the crude concrete of its sprawling urban morass. In He Got Game, the only common thread is the ball and the basket, and man's quest to put one in the other. The rest, as the movie strains to tell us, is only noise — corrupting, toxic noise.