AVClub: The Phenom begins more or less midconversation. Most movies about a pro athlete in crisis start with the crisis, perhaps augmented by some sports-announcer boilerplate filling in the backstory, before depositing the athlete on the doorstep of some kind of coach or therapist. Maybe the nominally more inventive might start with the coach and flash back to the trauma. Noah Buschel’s film depicts only the briefest bit of on-field action in the career of Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons) before pulling back to reveal that he’s at a session with Dr. Mobley (Paul Giamatti), a sports therapist tasked with figuring out why a promising young pitcher who skipped college and went straight to the majors has been busted back down to the minor leagues. Buschel enters this scene with such confidence, and with so little concern for packing information into his dialogue, that the film becomes immediately, almost counterintuitively inviting. He can’t entirely transcend how rote The Phenom’s basic story is, but for long stretches he does a hell of a job working around it.
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