REZ BALL is a recent sports drama that went straight to Netflix. I wouldn’t normally even know about something like that, but it’s co-written by Sterlin Harjo, creator of one of my favorite TV shows ever, Reservation Dogs (2021-2023). This is a little more along the lines of his indie dramas (I’ve previously reviewed his movies FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND and MEKKO).

The director is Sydney Freeland, who set it in her home state of New Mexico (Harjo’s are usually in Oklahoma). Like Harjo, she established herself with a drama at the Sundance Film Festival (DRUNKTOWN’S FINEST in 2014). Since then she’s directed lots of TV, including two episodes of Reservation Dogs and four of Echo.

It’s a high-school-basketball-team-comeback story, and narratively doesn’t deviate much from what you expect. So there’s a bunch of tragedy at the beginning involving the troubled life of “The Braided Assassin” Nataanii Jackson (Kusem Goodwind), star player of the Chuska Warriors. He’s got a really compelling, stoic presence and I really thought he was gonna be the main character, but when the team is forced to go on without him you realize oh, this is about his smiley buddy Jimmy Holiday (Kauchani Bratt) having to come into his own.

Jimmy has a complicated relationship with his mom Gloria (Julia Jones, HELL RIDE, JONAH HEX, various TWILIGHTs, WIND RIVER, COLD PURSUIT), who drinks too much and really needs to get over her resentment about her own basketball talent not getting her anywhere in life. But her being kind of a jerk in the beginning made me more invested in her subplot about trying to get her shit together, entirely behind Jimmy’s back.

She’s having money issues, so Jimmy has to pick up shifts at Blake’s Lotaburger, which he’s not enthused about, but he becomes close to his manager Krista (Zoey Reyes), who sees it less as a shitty job than a connection to the community. (The old man regulars like her because she speaks Navajo.)

The coach is former L.A. Sparks player Heather Hobbs (Jessica Matten, THE EMPTY MAN), who grew up here and knows everybody, but locals like to blame her when the team is struggling. “Her hometown hero status won’t save her from the aunties,” according to the color commentators played by Dallas Goldtooth (the spirit warrior from Reservation Dogs) and Cody Lightning (lead of FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND).

The title refers to a style of basketball developed on the reservations that Heather describes as, “We run fast, we shoot fast, we don’t ever stop.” She makes them practice with a seven second shot clock, believing speed can make up for the loss of Nataanii’s height. It also happens that the style could be effective against their main rivals the Santa Fe Catholic Coyotes. That team provides an excellent villain in their cocky blond captain Mason Troy (college basketball star Sam Griesel). I was really unsure whether he would just be defeated or if he would show a Johnny Lawrence style sign of respect at the end, but I hated him so much I wanted the former.

You gotta have a part of the season where nothing is working, they’re all fighting and working at cross-purposes. The big team building exercise Heather devises is to bus them all out to the desert where her grandma’s herd of sheep got out of their pen and they have to figure out how to get them back. “Man, props to the coyotes. These guys are hard to catch,” one of them says. Obviously this reminded me of Mickey’s catching-chickens training method in ROCKY III, but it’s a great idea because it does seem to kind of apply to basketball (they’re creating a shield to move the sheep in certain directions just like you would players) and it’s just very satisfying to see their joy when they succeed.

Jimmy feuds with Bryson (Devin Sampson-Craig), who’s a fuck up and gets drunk the night before games but it’s still not really cool that Jimmy shows up at his house and kinda starts a fight that has to be broken up by Bryson’s girlfriend/baby mama Dezbah (Amber Midthunder from PREY!). It’s a good subplot but I wish we got to see how they get over it.

This is maybe the only movie I’ve seen to have a reference to John Woo’s WINDTALKERS (unless THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT did?) and you can probly guess why. Most of their ways of improving at basketball also bring them back in touch with their cultural traditions. The kids have different levels of experience with it (Jimmy gets made fun of for his ignorance of Navajo) but when new assistant coach Benny Begay (Ernest Tsosie III, Dark Winds) shows up and starts burning sage they’re all open to it.

When the Warriors start turning the season around they get profiled on SportsCenter. It’s a happy moment for them to receive this recognition but also it’s talking about what rez ball is and you think uh… isn’t this calling attention to their secrets? and the answer is, yup. It leads to a real challenge and Goldtooth’s funniest line (wondering whether the Coyotes playing rez ball counts as cultural appropriation).

I keep thinking of the scene where Jimmy is practicing shooting and his mom comes out, sets down a lawnchair, says it’s the only way she can see her son because all he does is play basketball. At first I thought she was making a gesture of caring, and maybe she’s inching toward one, but she immediately starts back in with the doom and gloom about the rez and the futility of basketball careers. And there he is trying to ignore her and focus on his shots, while we can see that he’s literally on a dead end.

But also we see that glorious natural rock formation in the background. I looked it up and it’s called Shiprock. Tsé Bitʼaʼí (“rock with wings”) is the Navajo name, in reference to the legend of a giant bird that carried the Navajo to the southwest. Throughout the movie it’s used as a symbol of the beauty and strength of this community, with more than one scene where Heather stops and stares at it as she’s thinking about her connection to the place.

There are occasional stylistic flourishes in the basketball scenes, but it’s mostly shot in a really natural handheld style. The casting is really good – you can tell they cast a bunch of real basketball players, and sure enough a Time article says that there are no basketball doubles used and that they “put out a casting call that required her potential stars to not just read a scene, but also demonstrate that they could shoot a free throw, a three-pointer, and a layup.” It’s not just good for the many basketball scenes, but getting authentic jock types who maybe aren’t the best at communicating, except when they joke around with each other. I’m a sucker for these stories about men who are going through shit, but have never been taught how to (or have been taught not to) articulate their feelings.

According to the credits it’s “Inspired by the book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation and the New York Times article by Michael Powell,” but it’s really not about the same thing as the book, and Harjo told Time they wanted to do a fictional story in a world Freeland knew well. “It was from her community and she played basketball there. It was really about just telling a real story that we both connected to and felt authentic and real to us.”

Growing up I only knew of “the Indian reservation” as the place people went to to buy M-80s and other illegal fireworks before 4th of July. I appreciate that these days we’re able to see more people’s stories and learn about things we’ve never experienced. At the same time it’s cool that Freeland, who I’ve read is trans, has been able to projects that don’t center on that (if she doesn’t want to).

But it’s really not required to care about these things to enjoy REZ BALL – it’s just cool because it’s a setting I’ve never seen in this type of formula sports movie. A different kind of picturesque small town than, you know, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS or whatever. The same and different. When compared to Reservation Dogs it’s a more serious tone, and less irreverent, being about athletes instead of misfits. Not as hip. But it has the same kind of heart to it. The characters you really root for, the friends dealing with grief together, the struggle between wanting to get the hell out and having pride in where they come from. It’s a simple movie, but a moving one.

p.s. I was happy to notice two songs by Travis Thompson, a young rapper from the Seattle area. Take that, other areas.