64 year-old swimmer Diana Nyad swimming all the way from Cuba to Florida (and making it on her fifth attempt) is one of those inspiring stories that I totally missed when it happened.  I can’t remember for sure exactly what was going on in my life in 2013 but paying attention to inspirational sports stories was apparently not high on the agenda.

Fortunately, any amazing true story will eventually be turned into a film and that film will eventually premiere on Netflix in time for Oscar consideration.  That’s certainly the case with Nyad, which stars Annette Bening as the title character and Jodie Foster as her best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll.  The film follows Nyad as she spends four years of her life trying to make it from Cuba and Florida and prove the naysayers wrong.  Along the way, she learns about humility, she learns to value her friends, and she also starts to deal with the various traumas of her youth.

It’s not a bad film.  It may sound like a traditional sports biopic and, in many ways, it is.  The directors are documentarians making their feature debut and they do have a tendency to rely a bit too much on archival footage of network news reporters announcing that Nyad will be making another attempt to make the swim.  The film (and the characters) unquestioning love for Cuba can be a bit hard to take, considering that the story takes place at a time when Raoul Castro was still ruling the country.  (The amount of “Visit Cuba” shirts felt more than a little excessive.  Don’t visit Cuba as long as Jose Daniel Ferrer is being detained.)  That said, the cinematography is gorgeous and the film does a wonderful job of showing just how physically and mentally exhausting Nyad’s accomplishment was.  It’s not just that Diana is physically drained from the experience.  She also occasionally suffers hallucinations as a result of exhaustion and exposure and, often times, she’s unaware of how far along she is in her journey.  While Diana swims, Bonnie and the rest of her team steer her, trying to keep her moving with the unpredictable current.  This is a film that will leave you respecting professional swimmers and their support teams.

The film’s cast does a great job bringing the story to life.  As portrayed in the film, Diana Nyad can be a bit of a pain to deal with and, to her credit, Annette Bening doesn’t try to soften any of the character’s rough edges.  Nyad is a egotistical, grandiose, impractical, demanding, and frequently self-centered and it says a lot of about Bening’s performance that the audience still ends up sympathizing with her and her desire to not be dismissed as obsolete at the age of 60.  That said, the film truly belongs to Jodie Foster and Rhys Ifans, playing Nyad’s coach and her navigator.  While Nyad rails against age and insists that her destiny is to successfully make the swim,  it falls to the characters played by Foster and Ifans to just keep Diana alive.  Foster is the film’s heart, playing Bonnie as a tough but caring coach who understands that, even though they drive each other crazy, she and Nyad are meant to make the journey together.  While the film portrays Nyad’s accomplishment, what it truly celebrates is her friendship with Bonnie.  We should all be so lucky to have a friend and supporter like Bonnie in our lives.

It may not break any new cinematic ground but Nyad still does a good job of telling a worthy story.