When I found out that Adam Yauch, otherwise known as MCA of the Beastie Boys, was doing a documentary about the twenty four top high school prospects in the nation playing in a historically unprecedented game at New York's historically monumental Rucker Park, I couldn't help but anticipate a film that made generous use of the fish lenses why bumping away to a cranked soundtrack meshing hip hop and punk. In this regard, "Gunnin' For That #1 Spot" certainly doesn't disappoint.

"Gunnin'…" was shot during the summer and fall of 2006 (the scholastic calendar year being the graduating class of '07), debuted at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, and documents eight of the twenty four kids who would participate in tournament. If you're a basketball fan, some of these names will be familiar: Kevin Love, a big high school senior from Lake Oswego, Oregon, who would later go on to UCLA and take his team to the NCAA Final Four before entering the NBA draft after his collegiate freshman year, the lanky but dexterous Kyle Singler, another senior from Oregon who would later go to Duke, and Jerryd Bayless, a small guard with amazing quickness who would later end up at the University of Arizona before also declaring for the NBA draft after his freshman year. But if you know anything about this class, you'll know that the number one player was and still is undoubtedly Michael Beasley, a Massachusetts prospect who spent one year at Kansas State University simply because NBA rules forced him to. The documentary goes into these kids' homes, interviews their families and coaches and trainers, and offers up YouTube clippings of their prep school highlights. We see the slam dunks, the ninety-foot Hail Mary shots, the Allen Iverson killer crossovers; suddenly a thought jumps in my mind that I've seen all this before.

And I have, in the 1994 documentary, "Hoop Dreams". In that film, two basketball players were chronicled for the duration of their entire high school career. The personal insight and conflicts depicted in that film were at the time so groundbreaking that everything that's come since feels like a half-hour ESPN special. "Gunnin'…" sort of has that feel of a being a cross between an episode of And 1 and that documentary where a British journalist traveled around the U.S. interviewing Neo Nazi families. It's informative, yes, but in its information there's something second hand about it.

This leaves this film to be ultimately judged based on the success or failure of the game. In the setup, we sure do get suspense-there's a hanging overcast and a real threat of rain. If it rains, the game is called and will not resume. The organizers move the start time up two hours to try and beat the weather. And when the game actually begins, there's a clumsy opening as you can literally feel these kids (they are still kids) wondering if the moment might be too big for them. But when the first shot is made, they eventually settle in and show what they're made of. The thing that always annoys and fascinates me about official Rucker games is Bobbito Garcia, a well known voice in the basketball world who feels compelled to call the game through loudspeakers and crack jokes at the same time. I guess with a little movie editing this could have come out in such a way that heightened the tension on the court, but I fear Yauch was being true to the spirit of Rucker by letting him go on and on and on and on and on…there were times when he would ramble when there wasn't much action going on the court at all. But he always gets a pass when he immortalizes players with nicknames: Beasley's Rucker name is now "Be Easy"; Lance Stephenson got tagged with "Ice Water" and Singler was "Wireless" (get it?)

Whenever someone made a great play, we would be treated to it by a rewind, slow motion, and then maybe reverse angle look. It was nifty the first few times, but Yauch had a dirty habit of rewinding all the moves, and there were several that I was not at all interested in seeing two or three times. On the other hand, the film was most effective when the scene would slow down in real time (as opposed to rewinding and replaying in slow motion); there was a flat out awesome shot that someone made at the end of the first quarter that forced an impressive reaction from a room full of movie critics.

The prevailing philosophy that less is more certainly would improve my position on "Gunnin'…", and in clocking in at 90 minutes, it's probably 20 minutes too long. Though in writing this, I wouldn't deduct any of the profile time, and I certainly empathize with Yauch; the circumstances of the game itself lends itself to feel anticlimactic in some ways and he manages to squeeze a lot of good material out of it-plus, there's something energizing about listening to Jay-Z on surround theatre speakers while watching basketball. But I must concede that if young basketball hopefuls want a film about basketball that educates on the insight and reality of the game for high schoolers, "Hoop Dreams" is still the cream of the crop.

My Grade: B-

Running time: 90 minutes
Starring: Michael Beasely, Kevin Love, Jarryd Bayless
Directed by Adam Yauch
Distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures

Story by Simbarashe

Starpulse contributing writer