For
most baseball fans, Dock Ellis is best known as the man who won the 1976 AL
Comeback Player of the Year and helped pitch the New York Yankees into that
year’s World Series. It is a perfect example of how a great team can rejuvenate
veteran players. There are also those remember him for throwing a no-hitter
while under the influence of LSD. Jeffrey Radice profiles Ellis’s colorful
career and meaningful post-baseball life in No
No: a Dockumentary, which screens during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Radice
openly evokes Superfly and other
blaxploitation films when chronicling Ellis’s early seasons with the Pittsburgh
Pirates. Ellis liked to dress sharp, but he was not inclined to take guff off
anyone. However, he was far less
confident beneath his bluster, which is why he regularly took some narcotic
courage before starting a game.
While
our Yankee chauvinism might sound like an exaggerated put-on, the late Ellis might
not have objected. While he was happy to notch the no-no career milestone, many
of Dockumentary’s talking heads
suggest Ellis was uncomfortable with all the sophomoric jokey attention focused
on the LSD part of the story. After all,
some of the most compelling sequences follow Ellis’s drug-fueled implosion and
his subsequent comeback as an addiction counselor.
Radice
talks to a number of Ellis’s former teammates, family members, and ex-wives,
compiling a pretty thorough composite of his subject. He maintains a brisk pace, while Beastie Boy
Adam Horovitz’s score and the funky licensed tracks evoke the 1970’s vibe quite
distinctively. Ellis’s story also raises several topical issues, such as drug
use, domestic abuse, and the state of post-Jackie Robinson racial relations in
Major League Baseball. Radice gives them
all their proper due, but never strays too far from the baselines. Frankly, he gets the mix of social relevancy and
retro attitude just right. Highly
watchable, No No: a Dockumentary is
recommended for audiences beyond the obvious ESPN market. It screens again in
Park City today (1/24) and tomorrow (1/25) as part of this year’s Sundance Film
Festival.
