Rez Ball Gives Navajo Teens Their Own Friday Night Lights

Photo: Lewis Jacobs/Netflix

There’s a major barn burner waiting for anyone who presses play on the new Netflix sports drama Rez Ball, and we’re not talking about any of the games of high-school hoop it depicts in periodic, fleeting montage. No, the real fierce competition here is between everything distinctive and everything formulaic about this movie. On one side of the court, you have a vivid sense of culture, place, and milieu — the details of modern Native American life that characterize its arid rural backdrop. On the other side, you have the stuff of any post-Hoosiers basketball diary: the locker-room pep talks, the slow-motion buzzer beaters, the climbing of the ranks on the way to the championship game. You could say that the specific aspects of Rez Ball improve the boilerplate ones, but just as often, they seem at odds with each other, like two teams duking it out for our attention.

The film is set on a reservation in New Mexico. What football is to the small Texas town of Friday Night Lights, basketball is to this place: Most of the local boys want a spot on the team, the Chuska Warriors, and everyone comes out for the games. The sport offers distraction and maybe some semblance of hope for a struggling community. The star of the team, a lanky, brooding kid named Nataanii (Kusem Goodwind), has recently lost his mother and his sister in a drunk-driving accident. This is an all too common occurrence here, as we gather from various insert shots of roadside memorials.

Early into the film, fresh tragedy rocks the Warriors. Shattered by loss, the team is also knocked off its game. Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) — Nataanii’s shell-shocked best friend, the Robin to his Batman as the color commentators put it — is forced to assume the mantle of captain. Will the boys be able to fight through their grief and turn around their losing streak? Rez Ball, like the recent Ben Affleck tearjerker The Way Back, is really an earnest melodrama that conflates recovery off the court with a big comeback on it.

The inspiration here is Canyon Dreams, a 2019 nonfiction bestseller by New York Times columnist Michael Powell, who trailed a real high-school Navajo team in Arizona over a single dramatic season. Powell threw a spotlight on not just the particulars of rez ball — a faster, more intense version of the game played on reservations in the Southwest — but also the hardships facing the players, whose families coped with unemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation. It was a book about basketball, yes, but also about the generational trauma of Indigenous Americans.

That’s certainly an element of Rez Ball, which devises a fictional tapestry of conflicts from Powell’s source material. Navajo director Sydney Freeland, who co-wrote the film with Reservation Dogs’s co-creator Sterlin Harjo, parallels Jimmy’s emotional crucible with that of his mother, Gloria (Julia Jones), a former teenage-basketball star reluctant to support her son’s hoop dreams, perhaps out of fear they’ll lead him down the same path to disappointment she’s walked. The character’s struggle with sobriety is among a few subplots designed to paint a sobering picture of reservation life.

Other elements of the movie are more archetypal. The team’s coach, played by Dark Winds star Jessica Matten, is a former WNBA player nursing a breakup and discontent to be back on the reservation instead of in a more lucrative gig at a major university. She speaks mostly in platitudes and slogans: Leave it all on the court, dig deep, stay in the game, etc. You know the drill, the tough-love language of athletic mentors. Think this hometown hero will make peace with her homecoming? Meanwhile, Jimmy’s romance with a burger-shack co-worker (Zoey Reyes) feels like a producer note, though there’s a sweetness to how their courtship is sparked by her offer to teach him Navajo.

The Warriors have to get in touch with tradition to get their mojo back. They find strength in sheep-herding exercises and spiritual ceremonies, and start calling plays in their native language — a clever way to juke their well-funded championship rivals at a Santa Fe Catholic school. In a sense, Rez Ball finds a similar path to success: It partially gets around the familiarity of its underdog arc through cultural specificity. That extends from the game announcers peppering their analysis with talk of fry bread to the large, likable ensemble of Indigenous actors — though almost none of Jimmy’s teammates are granted much in the way of individual personalities or backstories. (For a fuller portrait of this interpersonal world, check out Netflix’s other take on the subject, the docuseries Basketball or Nothing, which follows the same Arizona reservation team profiled in Powell’s book.)

There’s an extra resonance to seeing these particular kids, the young stars of a historically marginalized community, get on the board. One might simply wish that in tracing their magic run, Rez Ball strayed a little further from the inspirational sports-pap playbook. Collapsing a whole season into a series of glossy highlight reels, overlaying its court action with swells of inspirational music (composed by indie electronic star Dan Deacon, who also did the soundtrack for another Netflix basketball drama, Hustle), arranging a rematch with the trash-talking suburban teens who trounced them in the first act: Crowd-pleasing cliché wins the day at the buzzer. But it’s not a blowout; the more singular side of the film keeps it close enough.