‘The Brittney Griner Story’ Review: A Compelling but Limited Look at a U.S. Basketball Star’s Russian Ordeal

Given the sensational aspects of her story, it was perhaps inevitable that star basketball player and former prisoner of the Russian state Brittney Griner would eventually become the subject of a film in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series. Griner’s basketball career was perhaps at its peak — both in the U.S. and abroad — when she was arrested at the Moscow airport after customs agents found nearly empty THC vape cartridges in her luggage, charged with a harsh drug charge, and eventually sentenced to nine years in what is essentially a gulag. Upon her arrest, Griner near-immediately became a political pawn used by the Putin regime, while family back home desperately advocated for her release.

Griner’s frightening ordeal is methodically recounted in Alexandria Stapleton’s The Brittney Griner Story, a straightforward, unflashy film that centers on Griner and her wife Cherelle as they navigate the arduous months that Griner was detained. The film is a sturdy, informative recitation of facts — though one does long for a bit more style, and perhaps for a wider purview. 

The film’s most valuable asset, unsurprisingly, is Griner herself. Stapleton offers ample time and space for the uninitiated to discover Griner’s charm and humor, her humble and soft-spoken intelligence. She’s an affable, easygoing narrator, reflecting on her experience with a nonchalance that never seems like a false front masking something dark. Emotions do arise, and Griner seems just as comfortable expressing those feelings as she does pragmatically talking through what it was like to have her life yanked sideways so suddenly, so terribly. 

Stapleton toggles between timelining Griner’s legal troubles and giving viewers the basic biographical information of Griner’s life: how she came to basketball, how she approached her burgeoning career, her coming-out journey, and her relationship with her beloved father. Griner’s personal history is certainly interesting, but one does get a little impatient waiting to get back to the harrowing thing that happened to her in 2022. The film is so traditional, so locked into a standard bio form that one craves some more dynamism — especially when watching it in a heightened setting like Sundance.

There is perhaps a more expansive film to be made about Griner and the global circumstances surrounding her detainment. Maybe a film that traces the trajectory of both Griner and another American detainee, Paul Whelan, who was eventually released in 2024 and was a name consistently evoked alongside Griner’s in the news from that time. Or a film that speaks more broadly about the mechanics of prisoner exchange, or about the American political temper of the last few years, which turned Griner into both a hero and, quite hideously, an emblem of the right’s fixation on wokeness and minority favoritism. 

That last aspect is addressed in The Brittney Griner Story, but only briefly, mentioned as another example of a hardship that Griner has had to overcome. There is more to say about that topic, though, about what happens when someone like Griner — a politically outspoken queer woman of color — becomes a symbol, and a cause, of the nation. (Some people really don’t like it, is what happens.) That sort of larger inquest will have to wait. 

Stapleton’s film is plenty engaging nonetheless, a chance to spend some time in Griner’s good company and to get a grimly fascinating (if glancing) look inside a Russian penal colony. (Yes, they are still called that.) The film leaves Griner seeming hopeful for the future and newly grateful for all the comforts and luxuries and opportunities of her Stateside life.

But Stapleton is also careful to show that there are still open wounds that need tending to, a trauma that may well linger for a long time to come. The film has let us get to know her support system well enough that we are comfortably assured that she will not be alone in that struggle.