Michael Jordan comes off flawed, bullish and fascinating in The Last Dance

Ostensibly, the new 10-hour Netflix documentary The Last Dance is about the 1997-98 Chicago basketball season. That’s the last time the Bulls were (cue a swell in the soundtrack) The Bulls.

Over the course of it, we are shown capsule biographies of Scottie Pippen (misunderstood malcontent), Dennis Rodman (lovable weirdo) and Phil Jackson (Obi-Wan Kenobi with a grease board).

Everyone knows these stories. They fit into the familiar tropes sports reporting is (tediously) drawn to.

Thankfully, Last Dance isn’t actually about that. It is in fact a character study of Michael Jordan.

Everyone, everywhere has seen Jordan, and no one, nowhere has known him. All you remember now of his off-court demeanour is that he was prickly and scripted. Everything Jordan said sounded as though it had been run past a lawyer first.

Was he a nice guy? Nike spent bajillions convincing people of that. A fun guy? He did make a movie with Bugs Bunny.

Beyond that, nothing. The man was a puzzle.

Jordan is 57 now. That’s the point at which people in his position begin to consider their legacy.

Perhaps it’s occurred to him that there must be some sweeping personal document to book-end all the trophies. None of us would care much about Alexander the Great if we didn’t know he had an unhealthy obsession with his mother. Every legend requires elements of frailty and humanity.

The film introduces us to present-day Jordan in his gaudy mansion, smoking a Cuban and enjoying a lowball full of something brown. He’s filled out since his playing days, but that only makes him look more like a boxer than a shooting guard.

From the off, everything about this production screams “Event TV.” So much so that Netflix is rolling it out episodically beginning on Monday, rather than in one great binge.

It may be an ensemble piece, but only one man is getting his name over the marquee. (When Barack Obama appears, the show identifies him as “former Chicago resident”.)

That sort of hype creates an expectation. Jordan rises to it, but possibly not in the way he’d intended.

This is as close as we’ve ever got to the real Michael Jordan. The real Jordan swears. A lot. The real Jordan has fewer fond memories of the past than you’d expect. And the real Jordan has often been an insufferable jerk.

In archival behind-the-scenes footage, we see him teasing Chicago general manager Jerry Krause for being short and fat. He turns to a trailing Bulls camera crew as he enters the locker room and says, “You guys are not allowed [in here]. … Just kidding!” A TV vassal (unsuccessfully) asks him for an autograph and the smirk Jordan skewers the guy with will make you cringe in your living room.

One of the early talking points from the four episodes made available for preview comes out of a scene shot on the Bulls’ plane during the mid-nineties.

Jordan is sitting with teammate Scott Burrell – an absolute nobody by NBA standards. Jordan looks into the camera and begins monologuing about Burrell’s, ahem, extracurricular activities. Burrell only realizes he’s being filmed after this torture is under way. He turns miserably and begins begging: “Hey. Hey. Don’t put that on tape. Come on. Come on.”

Jordan was never much of a smiler, but in this moment, he is positively radiant. Burrell’s humiliation delights him.

In an interview last week, Jordan said he worried the documentary (and the Burrell scene in particular) will make him seem “horrible.”

He’s right. It does. With his faux friendliness and ability to identify the weakest link, Jordan comes off as a textbook bully. Some of his former colleagues still seem frightened of him.

Perversely, that somehow makes Jordan more iconic.

Usually, these deep dives into the lives of famous athletes turn into hagiography – “You may have thought Player X was a bit of a monster – remember that time he put the mascot in hospital? – but he was in fact a cuddly marshmallow of a man. Here’s his grandmother saying so.”

This after-the-fact softening is good for sales, but makes for dreadful viewing.

Really great athletes – we’re speaking here about the ones who define eras – are often self-absorbed brutes. Their egoism is what set them above other, equally gifted competitors.

They don’t play for money or fame. They do it because they need recognition in some elemental way. Being the best isn’t enough. They must be constantly demonstrating who’s on top by shoving others to the bottom.

Sometimes they do that by scoring 63 points against the Celtics in a playoff game (Larry Bird: “That wasn’t Michael Jordan out there. That was God in disguise as Michael Jordan.”)

And sometimes they do it by singling out a defenceless schmuck on the team plane and making him squirm, just so everyone else sees them doing it.

We love them for one thing and hate them for the other, but the two things come from the same need. That’s an unpalatable fact of human nature.

At one point, Jordan recalls being chided by a coach for not sharing the ball.

“There’s no 'I' in team,” the coach says.

Jordan spits back: “But there is an 'I’ in win.”

Even 30 years later, you can feel Jordan seethe when he tells the story. Not just because he’s angry, but because he was right.

Jordan is still angry at everyone – at the Bulls for letting him go, at Pippen for quitting on a Game 7 because he got a migraine, at the Detroit Pistons for not shaking his hand when he’d finally beaten them. You are occasionally awed by the depth of this smouldering rage.

It’s not often you see a star shown in such shades of grey during his lifetime. It’s far less often that the star is complicit in the showing. And if this is Jordan revealed, it is not Jordan apologetic or Jordan grown thoughtful by the passing of time.

He is still the person who was once cut from his high-school basketball team – one animated by resentment.

It isn’t the useless, festering resentment the rest of us feel. It’s the sort that certain special individuals turn into fuel. Jordan was great, at least in part, because the idiots around him constantly failed to be.

This Jordan is not a nice guy or a fun guy. Last Dance instead exposes him as a flawed and fascinating guy.

Here, finally, is the three-dimensional person who played the role of 2-D cartoon on Saturday afternoon TV when you were a kid.

It thrillingly reminds us that the greatest people are never great in every way. Were they so, they would still be great, but they would not be people.