By Brad Newsome
August 5, 2020 — 1.14pm
It's too easy to miss brilliant streaming shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on or skip.
Brabham Stan*, from Friday
This new feature-length documentary about Australian Formula One legend Jack Brabham is many things. It's celebratory and critical, it's evocative in its chronology, impressive in its list of interviewees, and eclectic and idiosyncratically busy in its visual style. What it can't quite do in the end is give the viewer a completely satisfying sense of the man himself - who seems to have remained something of a closed book even to people who knew him for many years. Everything else, though, comes into compellingly sharp focus. The raw stats of Brabham's Formula One career you can see up the top of his Wikipedia page: 126 starts, 14 wins, 31 podiums and three world championships.
Writer-director Akos Armont and writer Tony Davis bring them to life, beginning with the sheer, terrifying danger of motor-racing in the postwar period. Brabham was at Le Mans in 1955, when crash debris flew into the crowd, killing 83 spectators. Three months later death came even closer when his co-driver, Jim Mayers, died in a fiery crash in a race in Northern Ireland. Brabham, of course, persevered in extraordinary style - in 1959 he would literally push his car across the finish line in the race that secured his first Formula One championship, and years later he would become the first driver to win a Formula One race, and then a championship, in a car of his own construction.
The magnitude of his achievement is underlined here by the recollections of contemporaries including Jackie Stewart, Stirling Moss and John Surtees, as well as Ron Tauranac, the engineering genius who co-founded Brabham's constructor and racing team in 1962. But while Brabham gets plaudits for his generosity in mentoring future rivals, the film doesn't shy away from his reputation for ruthlessness, which apparently extended to deliberately driving so as to throw stones and gravel at the cars behind him. "I've had more marks on my helmet from Jack Brabham than I have in any accident," Stewart remarks. Unusually for a sports biography, Brabham also highlights the effect that Brabham's long absences and taciturn personality had on his family. Particularly when it comes to Brabham's Le Mans-winning son David, who is taking the family name forward with the Australian-made Brabham BT62 supercar, and to whom Armont increasingly turns his focus in the later part of the film. It's an engrossing, illuminating piece of work, and a particularly timely one in capturing the recollections of Tauranac, who died in July.