“Shooting Stars”, which is currently available on Netflix in South Korea, is a standard biographical sports drama film which plays and then delivers as much as expected. While any good sports drama film needs to do more than that in my inconsequential opinion, the movie is not boring at all mainly thanks to the genuine sense of friendship and camaraderie among its main characters, and it is a shame that the movie is content with simply playing within its genre conventions instead of being driven by more spirit and personality to distinguish itself.

The movie, which is based on the name of the same memoir written by LeBron James with some assistance from Pulitzer-winning writer Buzz Bissinger, is about how much James and his three close friends/colleagues distinguished themselves during their early years in Akron, Ohio. Even when they were no more than 10 years old, they all were quite determined to pursue their future basketball career, and they are surely expected to go together to one certain well-known local high school when they are about to start their first high school year several years later.

However, Dru Joyce III (Caleb McLaughlin) has a different opinion. Mainly because of his rather short height, he is not going to be allowed to play with James (Mookie Cook) and their friends Willie McGee (Avery Wills) and Sian Cotton (Khalil Everage) in the same group, and that naturally makes him look for the other option. When he comes to learn that a certain famous university basketball coach becomes the new basketball team coach of some other high school in their neighborhood, Joyce boldly approaches to this coach for showing his considerable potential and talent, and he also succeeds in convincing James and the others to go to that other high school instead.

It is indeed a bold gamble, but it is succeeded much better than anyone expected. Once they prove their worth as a dream team to be excited about, James and his friends begin to excel themselves game by game even during their first year, and it certainly looks like the sky is the only limit for them, especially as James draws a lot of public attention as a very promising player who can be as famous as, say, Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.

Of course, we all know what will eventually happen around the end of the story, and the screenplay by Frank E. Flowers, Tony Rettenmaier, and Juel Taylor thankfully does not waste any time as steadily rolling its main characters from one expected point to another. While there surely come some moments of conflicts and doubts later in the story, the movie does not put too much emphasis on these more serious moments, and it continues to jump and bounce along the story as its main characters go all the way for more athletic accomplishment on their way.

In case of basketball game scenes in the film, director Chris Robinson and his crew members including cinematographer Karsten Gopinath and editor Jo Francis do not disappoint us at all. Even if you do not know that much about basketball (Full Disclosure: I am one of such persons), you can easily and instantly follow the flow of those basketball games in the movie without much confusion, and you may gladly go along with a number of deliberately stylized shots during the basketball game scenes in the film.

However, the movie often stumbles in case of bringing more life and personality to its main characters. While Mookie Cook, Calebe McLaughlin, Avery Wills, and Khalil Everage generate effortless chemistry together on the screen in addition to being quite convincing in those basketball game scenes, it takes some time for us to get accustomed to their roles because their characters are a bit too flatly streamlined to engage us more. As a matter of fact, James in the movie is actually the least interesting member in the bunch despite his future fame and success to come, and I must confess that he sometimes feels to me like the exact opposite of what my late mentor/friend Roger Ebert wrote at the beginning of his 1968 review on William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” (1968): “The trouble with “Funny Girl” is almost everything except Barbra Streisand.”

Fortunately, the movie at least does not forget that its dramatic power lies in the longtime friendship among James and his fellow team members, and the earnest youthful energy from these four performers playing James and his three friends lifts up the movie at times. In addition, several other main cast members mostly acquit themselves well despite their functional supporting parts. While Scoot Henderson manages to leave some impression as another key player who comes to join James and his friends as the fifth member of the group, Wood Harris, Algee Smith, Natalie Paul, and Dermot Mulroney are effectively cast as the crucial adult figures in the story, and both Mulroney and Harris surely deliver their respective big speech scenes as well as you can expect from your average basketball drama movie.

On the whole, “Shooting Stars” is rather deficient compared to its numerous seniors including, yes, “Hoosiers” (1986), but it is fairly watchable thanks to its competent aspects including the diligent efforts from its main cast members. I wish the movie delved deeper into its main characters and then dug up more spirit and personality to observe and remember, but I was entertained to some degree during my viewing, so I will not stop you at all if you want something causal for killing your spare time.