Kenny Dalglish: a ‘warm and gusty’ documentary

Asif Kapadia made his name with a trilogy of “vivid” documentaries about major cultural figures, said Ed Potton in The Times: the racing driver Ayrton Senna, the footballer Diego Maradona and the singer Amy Winehouse. Now he has turned his lens on Kenny Dalglish. Kapadia is a Liverpool fan, so it makes sense that he should want to focus on probably the club’s “greatest player”. And in this “warm and gutsy portrait”, he uses archive footage, with audio overlaid, to trace “King Kenny’s” career, from his working-class childhood in Glasgow to superstardom.

It’s a thrilling watch, said James Pearce on The Athletic. Dalglish, now 74, acts as narrator, offering a characteristically self-deprecating account of his life; and the footage of the matches with which he made his name, first at Celtic and, from 1977, at Liverpool, is “mesmerising”.

But the focus of the film is on Dalglish as the “everyman” whose fate it was to take a city’s “woes on his shoulders”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. He became Liverpool’s manager just after the 1985 Heysel stadium disaster, when riots at the “dilapidated” Belgian ground before a Liverpool vs. Juventus match led to 39 deaths; then came the tragedy of Hillsborough, when 97 Liverpool supporters were killed in a crush. Dalglish was stoical in its aftermath, attending funeral after funeral and repeatedly pushing back against the false narrative that Liverpool fans had been to blame for the disaster. He emerges as a straightforward figure, without the “agonised complexity” that gave Kapadia’s other films their “danger and fascination”; but perhaps it was his “ingenuous simplicity” that enabled him to survive.

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