Film study: "Untold: Johnny Football"

The new Netflitx is so interested in reliving the good times that it fails to fully account for their consequences.

There is a really good documentary to be made about Johnny Manziel.

That documentary would have to do more than capture the height of his fame and the depth of his fall, though. It would need to explore the way social media enabled Manziel to become so famous so fast, and it would have to fully address the questions of substance abuse and assault. “Untold: Johnny Football” is not that documentary.

The film – which debuted last week on Netflix – is entertaining, informative and there are moments it’s even provocative, but as a documentary it’s more a continuation of the phenomenon that Manziel became as opposed to an cogent analysis of it. That’s too bad because there’s a lot to be learned about the things that enabled the meteoric rise in popularity and the costs all that fame wound up having on the young man, his family and the others who may have been hurt along the way.

Watching the documentary, I felt Manziel was often playing a character, and he concedes as much early in the film.

“There’s who you are as a football player,” he says, “and who you are as a human being, and the two for me were just really, really different. It almost felt like I had an alter ego.”

I wanted to hear more from that human being, less from the alter-ego. I also had the sense if we heard more from the human being, the alter-ego would seem less amusing, more harmful. Now, it’s possible I’m wrong about that, and Manziel – now 30 – is entirely at peace with the bill that Johnny Football rang up, but I have my doubts.

We see Manziel firing up what appears to be a joint early in the documentary, answering questions with a can of Stella Artois sitting on the arm rest of a patio chair later. In between, we find out Manziel went to rehab after his first season in the NFL, and the following year, after the Browns released him, he used a lot of cocaine and opiates, going from 215 pounds down to 175 over the span of nine months. The topic of Manziel’s substance use is not fully addressed, though.¹