A Cocky Kid's Dream Crumbles in Sobering 'Lenny Cooke' Film

Before YouTube provided endless mixtapes of teenage basketball stars, before LeBron James changed amateur basketball forever to fuel a 24/7 appetite for online updates on hot prospects, Lenny Cooke was basketball's next big thing

Cooke, a 6-foot-6-inch swingman out of Brooklyn, was the nation's top player, seemingly on the fast track to NBA fame and riches. But he never made it

That disconnect is the subject of Lenny Cooke, a powerful documentary exploring the dark reality of prodigious promise gone unfulfilled

Seeing a bloated Cooke rationalize his basketball demise is sobering indeed after watching him confidently interact with future NBA stars including James and Carmelo Anthony as a teen. The film is aided tremendously by the fact that directors Ben and Joshua Safdie are able to use prime footage of Cooke as a high schooler that was shot by Adam Shopkorn in the early 2000s for a never-completed documentary about the young star Read more...