116 min | R | December 10, 2021 | STXfilms
A star running back goes on strike two days before the national championship, demanding pay for the athletes who make the sport billions. He has the one piece of leverage the system cannot survive losing. The argument is bulletproof. The movie keeps shooting itself.
A star running back leads a player strike forty-eight hours before the national championship game. He wants compensation for college athletes. He has the leverage of one game the entire sport cannot afford to lose. National Champions is really about who gets paid in a multibillion-dollar industry built on unpaid labor. The film stages that argument almost entirely in hotel rooms and conference calls, and the staging exposes the play it came from.
Stephan James plays LeMarcus James with conviction and a quiet stubbornness that holds the screen. He delivers speeches that should sink under their own weight and keeps them grounded. J.K. Simmons plays Coach James Lazor as a man whose loyalty to the system collides with his loyalty to his player. Simmons does his best work in silence, watching a kid he trained turn the coach’s own lessons against him. Tim Blake Nelson plays a fixer named Rodger Cummings who arrives to break the strike, and Nelson’s oily calm gives the film its only real menace. Jeffrey Donovan plays the conference boss Mark Titus as a man counting losses in real time.
Ric Roman Waugh directs from a script Adam Mervis adapted from his own play. The direction cannot solve the central problem. The film is people in rooms talking, and Waugh shoots it like people in rooms talking. He cuts between locations to manufacture momentum, and the editing keeps reminding you that nothing physical is happening. The dialogue swings between genuine arguments about exploitation and cheap television monologues. A subplot involving a marriage exists to pad a story that is otherwise a debate.
The argument at the center of National Champions is correct and urgent. The athletes generate the money and see none of it. The film knows this and says it well in a handful of scenes. Then it undercuts itself with twist reveals and speeches that play to the back row. The good version of this material trusts the argument to carry the film. This version does not trust it, so it keeps reaching for a plot it does not need.