On demand: "Kenny Dalglish"

After a pair of more experimental ventures - 2022's dance film Creature and 2024's environmental speculation 2073 - Asif Kapadia returns to what he knows (and arguably does) best: the feature-length documentary portrait of a notable public figure. Unlike previous Kapadia studies Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, however, the tragedy in Kenny Dalglish's life hasn't been terminal. From an early age, Dalglish was a winner, then a champion, skipping briskly past off-pitch challenges in much the same way he did opposition defenders. (If there's any past Kapadia subject he resembles, it's a thoroughly sober Diego Maradona.) This doubtless accounts for the new doc's initially jolly, Roy of the Rovers-like framing: comic-strip credits of the kind Dalglish's fans would have pored over by bedside light back in the Seventies and Eighties, football stickers as on-screen punctuation, key goals from his Celtic and Liverpool days scored to period rock, a brief recap of Dalglish's courtship of Marina Harkins, the Glaswegian barmaid he wooed during lunchbreaks from training and soon thereafter wedded ("the best signing I ever made", as he later quipped). Here, once more, is the upward trajectory of a simpler age, when top-flight teams played, roomed, socialised and commuted together like teams, as opposed to disparate multi-millionaires flown in from all points via charter jet. Here, too, an age when football was free-to-air, where the F.A. Cup final was still a big deal, and where the biggest perk available to Liverpool players were chocolate digestives (brought in for the exclusive delectation of the Reds' self-described 'Jock Mafia': Dalglish, Souness and Hansen) rather than plain. In courting the football nostalgists among us, Kapadia seems to be enjoying himself again, waving a cinematic rattle for an inspirational figure of his youth, revisiting key matches - and great goals - on Grandstand and Sportsnight.

As a Liverpool fan himself, though, Kapadia has also internalised the significance of Heysel and Hillsborough to this particular story - and here tragedy does re-enter the picture; to contradict Bill Shankly, football suddenly appears something of far less import than life and death. After a first half of genial cheering up Wembley Way and down memory lane, Kenny Dalglish begins to gain in focus and rigour as its subject is confronted by off-the-pitch loss. Dalglish's comments to a reporter after Liverpool's eventual defeat at Heysel - "we did lose, but we didn't lose as much as some" - had already demonstrated an ability to hold the constituent elements of this world in proportion. Yet Hillsborough was the point at which a sporting figurehead fully assumed the mantle of statesman, Dalglish showing up time and again on behalf of the families bereaved that sorry afternoon, and insisting "it was our turn to be their supporters". (At one point, we even hear him directly overwriting Shankly, telling the press "football's irrelevant".) Kapadia offers a slightly more complete picture of Hillsborough's aftermath than did Stewart Sugg in his 2017 doc Kenny; indeed, the closing stretch here is so potent - and yet so compressed in its coverage of the institutional cover-up initiated by the Tory government in collaboration with West Yorkshire Police - I wondered whether Kapadia might have done better to make Dalglish at and after Hillsborough the whole film, rather than mournfully attaching it to a more conventional overview. The latter suffers from the fact Dalglish has remained to this day a somewhat guarded and private man - entirely new revelations are few and far between; the Sugg film may actually have benefitted from tempting Dalglish back out before the cameras, allowing us to parse his expressions - but the Scotsman's quiet decency in the face of outrageous slurs remains as stirring as anything his younger self achieved on the pitch. In times of turbulence for Liverpool Football Club, Kenny Dalglish stepped up and led by example; I don't doubt there are Reds fans who'd welcome him back in the dugout this very weekend.

Kenny Dalglish is now streaming via Prime Video.