High Flying Bird shows athletes are more powerless and powerful than they know

Steven Soderbergh’s basketball drama probes the fraying covenant between white power brokers and their mostly black labor force

Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, written by the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and available for streaming on Netflix, is the finest movie ever made about the business of professional sports, not for the answers it purports to give about a billion-dollar industry charged by undercurrents of race and politics but the questions it asks.

Related: High Flying Bird review – Soderbergh scales new heights on Netflix