More than a decade ago, Alex Gibney was preparing a documentary on Lance Armstrong when the plot changed. Armstrong was revealed, incontrovertibly, not just as a mendacious, pugnacious cheater, but something worse. When you punch down and sue your masseuse for defamation, all the while knowing she was correct when she accused you of doping, you are not going to earn anyone’s sympathy. Gibney handled the curve masterfully, and his documentary, The Armstrong Lie, gave the subject his due as an athlete, while laying bare Armstrong’s badly dented character.
A few years ago, Gibney, as fine a documentarian as they come, was thrown a similar turn. He was preparing a film on Boris Becker, the charming but flawed tennis star. Midway through filming, a series of criminal charges arose, and Becker was found guilty of various bankruptcy offenses in the U.K. and sentenced to a prison term.
Again, Gibney, whose breakout doc might have been an exposé of Enron, followed the money and followed the story. What emerges is a triumph, a film both empathetic and journalistic, a piece of work that triggers this swirl of emotion. After watching Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker, which drops April 7 on AppleTV+, you like Becker; you pity Becker; you are furious with Becker, specifically that someone so charming and worldly could also be so naive and hubristic and self-sabotaging. Unlike Armstrong, now that Becker has paid his arrears, financial and cosmic—he is out of prison, rebuilding his finances and a man without a country, expelled from the U.K. and supposedly looking to leave the fishbowl of his native Germany—you root for his comeback.
