‘Rapinoe’ Review: Doc Portrait of American Soccer Icon Is Engaging and Inspiring, if Necessarily Incomplete

The career highlights and basic biographical details of U.S. soccer legend Megan Rapinoe are not hard to find. Considering she’s spent well over a decade as one of the most famous athletes in the world, that information can be located in countless profiles and interviews, her Wikipedia page, her own memoir.

What Rapinoe, the new documentary by filmmaker Rebeca Huntt, aims to offer is something more intimate: a portrait of the star in flux, following her retirement from playing in 2023. On that level, it’s engaging and inspiring, thanks to Huntt’s relaxed approach and Rapinoe’s typically radiant presence. But its timing also renders it necessarily incomplete — a setup for a next chapter that, within the film’s 92 minutes, never quite comes.

Compiling old home movies, news reports, game footage and interviews both existing and new, Rapinoe, premiering this weekend at TIFF, cuts a fairly straightforward, mostly chronological path through its subject’s life from childhood to the present day. It’s a testament to Rapinoe’s incredible talent and enormous celebrity that many of the stops will be familiar even to those (like your humble reviewer) who’ve never followed Rapinoe or her sport very closely: the World Cup wins, the Olympic medals, her coming out, the fight for equal pay with the U.S. National Men’s Team, her support of Colin Kaepernick and the subsequent blowback.

Huntt’s choice to cast much of what we’re seeing in a warm grain, with dates and locations captioned in a digital font reminiscent of ’90s camcorder footage, gives Rapinoe the feel of something raw and private — as do flattering but frank-sounding interviews with loved ones like Rapinoe’s parents; her twin sister (and, for a time, fellow soccer player) Rachael; and Rapinoe’s ex as of earlier this year, WNBA player Sue Bird.

Rapinoe’s most persuasively authentic element, however, is Rapinoe herself. Never one to camouflage or censor herself, the athlete and activist comes across in the film as charming, spontaneous, admirably self-aware and, above all, unapologetically herself. She’s game for lying on the sofa, as if in a shrink’s office, at Huntt’s suggestion (though she doesn’t seem to stay there long). She grins readily, jokes around unself-consciously and speaks frankly, if briefly, about her thoughts and emotions and even her regrets.

It’s easy, within this framework, to feel like we’re being let in on the inner circle, to know Rapinoe as her friends might — that we’re standing just off frame as she reflects on what might be her last-ever match while going through her multi-step skincare routine, that it’s our own eyes hovering inches from her face during an intense physical therapy session. This sense makes Rapinoe more compelling than most of the reverent celebrity docs that have flooded our screens as of late, too many of which seem more interested in casting their subjects as untouchable saints rather than flesh-and-blood people we might be able to know.

The closeness, unsurprisingly, has limits. Rapinoe has no major new bombshells, its most promisingly revealing throughline the way Rapinoe talks about “disassociation” as both the “armor” that’s made her so successful in her career and the thing that’s kept her from fully feeling her emotions. Beginning therapy in the last several years, she reveals, stripped this habit of its protective power. Her newfound tendency toward self-reflection made it harder to be in the moment, which the film goes so far as to suggest accounts for her fateful missed penalty kick at the 2023 World Cup.

But Rapinoe not only declines to articulate precisely what it means by disassociation (is underestimating the ferocity of the pushback to her support of Kaepernick an example of it, as Bird suggests, or just a reflection of Rapinoe’s sheltered perspective as a white woman who’d heretofore been a national darling?); it stops short of showing us how it’s changed Rapinoe’s outlook on life. Certainly, no one, famous or otherwise, owes it to the world to let us sit in on her therapy sessions, or to reveal in painstaking detail how precisely she’s working through the issues raised within them.

Given how often the word “disassociation” gets brought up by Rapinoe and her loved ones themselves, however, it seems odd that Rapinoe treats the concept so vaguely. Perhaps it’s because at this point, Rapinoe herself does not seem to know precisely what to make of this insight into her own psychology; as she puts it, “It’s like the old operating system not working anymore, but I don’t have a new one.” The film more or less leaves it at that, with Rapinoe expressing her excitement about the next phase of her life but offering only a bare hint, via a closing caption that alludes to her work as an activist, podcaster and sports commentator, at what that entails.

Or maybe it’s because Rapinoe, acutely aware of how her platform has given her the power to rouse or lead others, seems more interested in reminding her fans of their own power. In one of the film’s last scenes, she tells us, “I know who I am and I know I can’t really be another way. I like who I am and I like that I’m this way,” she says near the end of the doc, as if the previous 90-plus minutes might have left any doubt. In the very last sequence, she reads from a Mary Oliver poem: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your wild and precious life?” This, Rapinoe suggests, is what she’s done with hers. She leaves it up to you to decide what to do with her example.