Baseball Biopic 'Spaceman' Is Underwhelming & Conventional [Review]

As someone with little interest in or knowledge of baseball beyond the basics, it was refreshing to find that 5-time Emmy winner Brett Rapkin‘s biopic of controversial pitcher Bill Lee, “Spaceman,” is more a study of an American anomaly than a breakdown of the sport itself. Rapkin’s promise is to take us on a journey inside the mind of a character embedded in the counterculture movements of the 1970s, and the possible tolls that fame can take on someone so outspoken among his loyal peers. What we get is a film that fails to live up to any kind of promise at all, bouncing between tones but remaining solidly within convention.

Beginning around the time of Bill Lee’s release from professional baseball due to his rambunctious behavior, “Spaceman” has the job of detailing the interesting period in which Lee had to attempt to make his way back into the sport he loves while keeping his penchant for volatile, politically motivated stump speeches. His life at home isn’t much better, and though the film doesn’t go into nearly enough detail, we can see some family issues causing cracks. The divorce he’s going through will limit his time with his children even more, and his family seems less than interested in his sporting career now that he’s more or less off the map.

The opening shot, a slow push towards Lee’s kitchen where he is semi-nude, sprinkling cannabis flakes on his pancake breakfast, is an early harbinger of what’s to follow. Josh Duhamel‘s performance as “Spaceman” Bill Lee is notably charismatic, but from this opening shot we can see just how little the actor has to work with. Rapkin has reduced a potentially interesting character into a caricature of someone’s cool uncle that you remember from middle school, the kind of guy that passes a joint around while teaching life lessons. While it could be expected that this shallow characterization will be developed upon once the plot gets going, Rapkin doesn’t seem interested in tinkering with Lee’s nuances aside from his drug use, which is played down for laughs. The real-life events are calling out for some of his political ideals – defined by one announcer as “Somewhere to the left of Che Guevara” – to be expanded upon, but the movie remains shallow in focus, leaving out any nitty-gritty details in the fear of ruining its attempt at hero worship.

And this is where “Spaceman” shows its deepest issues. The characterization of Bill Lee in Rapkin’s film is inherently unlikable. From his neglect of his children to his pressuring of his local senior ball team to smoke with him before a game, the movie never once allows us once to connect with Lee’s character on a base emotional level. Usually when a film features a flawed main character it will find a way to garner audience sympathy, but Rapkin’s version of this is to get characters to list off his sporting accomplishments as if the amount of trophies on a shelf can make up for morally detestable behavior. Are we expected to think of this man, so obviously left of field in every way, as some kind of cult hero? I don’t even think Bill Lee himself wanted to be remembered as one.

There is some slapdash use of frenetic visual style that suggests something more at play, but thematic weight never seems to materialize. Some artful slow-motion is employed early, and two animation sequences stand out as artistic triumphs, but they exist without purpose, and their reason for existing could easily be budgetary considering their penchant for skipping over large portions of plot. A quick series of close-ups in a bar imply that we are now viewing people through Lee’s perspective, but the choice to never return to this subjectivity leaves the potentially great idea as just another piece of a puzzle that never really creates a whole picture.

Various plot elements are left dangling by the film’s conclusion, a rather silly set piece that hammers the message home once again that fame and accomplishments are much more important than one’s own self-improvement and morality. There seems like there could have been quite the stylish biopic in Rapkin’s version of events, but the telling is underwhelming, making this film a continuous stream of possibilities that are never opened or explored. [C]