Lomu, from directors Gavin Fitzgerald and Vea Mafile’o, takes a different approach to the majority of sports documentaries: it treats its subject’s brilliance as the least mysterious part of the story and spends most of its runtime focusing on the man himself. That brilliance is real and undeniable: an All Black at 19, an unstoppable winger who redefined what the position could look like, a name that meant something to people who’d never watched a match before he was involved in the sport.
The film doesn’t skimp on this, but uses his sporting legend mainly as a contrast: the more dominant Lomu looked from the outside, the more the documentary wants to show what that dominance cost him on a personal level.
Several threads run through the film, and none of them are comfortable. The first is family. Lomu’s early life was unsettled; years away from his parents, a difficult return, and a father whose religious strictness turned into violence at home, eventually driving the sports great out of the house as a teenager.
The film treats this not as backstory but as an explanation of what shaped the man he became. His later ambivalence about tradition, and the disapproval that trailed his personal relationships throughout his life, reads as an ongoing negotiation with that early rupture.
Another thread is realated to money. Lomu’s career coincided almost exactly with rugby’s shift to professionalism, and he became one of the first players anywhere to be treated as a genuine commercial commodity, which meant agents, contracts, and disputes he was rarely equipped to face on his own. It is however his battle with a fatal kidney disorder diagnosed near the height of his fame, that one that overshadowed the rest of his career.
In broaching the familial turmoil surrounding his own memorial, the directors have managed to tell a touching story about a man so widely claimed by so many that he was never going to be laid to rest without some friction. The documentary is honest enough not to whitewash his story.
Lomu is in Cinemas on September 7th
