Air is a celebration of the people at Nike who transformed the athletic shoe market back in the 1980s with one legendary product. I’m told that audiences are bursting into applause when the newly designed Air Jordan is first presented in close-up, as if a beloved star had suddenly made a cameo appearance.

The shoe is spoken of as a kind of totem for the young Michael Jordan, the phenomenal basketball player who fulfills the movie’s often repeated bit of supposed Zen wisdom: “A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it and gives it meaning.”

But in Ben Affleck’s Air, Michael Jordan himself is too important to be captured on film. He’s like Jesus Christ in classic Hollywood movies, when the sign of his holiness meant we couldn’t look directly at his face and had to settle for the back of his head, or his shadow, or the awed looks of ordinary mortals transfixed by him. (Grainy long shots of him playing basketball are also permitted.)