Diego Maradona documentary captures his mercurial and maddening essence

This superb new documentary summarises the unprecedented prowess of Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona. Just as miraculous as his instinctive wizardry on the pitch was his unquenchable appetite for self-destruction off it.

“A bit of cheating, and a lot of genius.”

This is how one of the many unseen interviewees in a superb new documentary summarises the unprecedented and often unfathomable prowess of Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona.

Such a simplistic verdict has been the stock epitaph for Maradona — both as a footballer and a man — for far too long.

Sensing it is high time the many and varied complexities of the Maradona story be recorded and re-examined for posterity, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia has approached his oft-maligned subject with refreshing candour and curiosity.

Documentary enthusiasts will immediately know Kapadia is the right man for such a difficult job. For everyone else, his stirring, moving work on his past two projects, Senna and Amy, should be evidence enough.

Kapadia accurately captures Maradona’s maddening essence.

The big move made by the filmmaker in capturing the mercurial, maddening essence of Maradona is executed very early in the doco.

Maradona’s remarkable backstory — which could easily have warranted half the running time here — is dispensed with underneath the opening credits.

It might seem rather heartless to quickly brush over Maradona’s rise from poverty in the slums of Buenos Aires to becoming a teenage prodigy who provided for his entire family from the age of 15.

However, there is so much richly revealing ground to cover in the select time span isolated by Kapadia — Maradona’s seven years playing for the unfashionable Italian club Napoli — that the selective focus does not seem ruthless at all.

Spanning 1984 through 1991, Maradona’s time at Napoli was studded with dizzying highs (including two league titles for the traditional underdogs) and damning lows (drugs were ever-present, as were the local dons of organised crime).

The documentary shows Maradona’s personal self destruction.

But there was no denying his wizardry on the soccer pitch.

There were scandals galore. An illegitimate child virtually born on national TV. A never-ending procession of fairweather friends, business associates, mistresses and manipulators.

And on top of all that, there was the inflammatory ‘Hand of God’ incident at the 1986 World Cup, where Maradona sent Argentina’s bitter rivals England packing from the tournament with an illegal goal that eluded detection by game referees.

Sportspeople of today who complain of living life in a virtual fishbowl come off as mere whingers when you get a grip on what Maradona went through during this era.

Just as miraculous as his instinctive wizardry on the pitch was his unquenchable appetite for self-destruction off it.

An unyielding inability to say no to drugs, sex and dangerous crime bosses is a constant theme here. But so too is Maradona’s ability to preserve his genius with the ball at his feet for an unfathomable number of years, before it all catches up with him.

DIEGO MARADONA (M)

Director: Asif Kapadia (Senna)

Starring: Diego Maradona.

Rating: ****1/2

When life is both a winning score and a losing result