Metacritic reviews

It’s an unabashed celebration of a maverick talent, with all the highlights you’d expect from an extraordinary career.

Barney Douglas’s doc about tennis maverick John McEnroe belongs to that rare handful of portraits that should find an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself. In this, it has a kinship with Asif Kapadia’s films Senna and Diego Maradona.

In the autobiographical documentary McEnroe... we’re reminded of McEnroe’s dominance on the court — as well as the antics that earned him a reputation as a brat who polarized the tennis world.

Though the film initially promises to follow its subject into a dark night of the soul wherein he wrestles with demons, “McEnroe” is every bit as much a celebration of his legacy as a gifted bad boy.

There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries.

The documentary doesn’t give the sense of McEnroe as a person that Douglas’s film does. But it gives a rather astonishing sense of him as a player. With all due respect to those other McEnroe guises, that’s the one that matters.

The talking heads aren’t particularly revealing and there are some strange filmmaking choices. But McEnroe makes for incredibly likeable company and the tennis, as ever, remains sublime.

The rock’n’roll bad boy of tennis is watchably if uncritically celebrated in this documentary portrait by Barney Douglas; it is a film that leaves unsolved the riddle, if it is a riddle, of John McEnroe’s confrontational on-court personality.

An engaging chronicle, nonetheless.