'The Redeem Team's' Modern History of America

The emblematic figure of American life in 2008 was Barack Obama, the one we had been waiting for, the hinge between eras, the basketball fan who taught America to say "yes" at the end of an awful, stupid decade of "no." Yet such is the alienness of the world of only 15 years ago that it doesn’t feel strange that Obama isn’t mentioned and doesn't show up on screen in The Redeem Team, the thrilling new Netflix documentary about the United States’s recovery of its rightful gold medal in men’s basketball in Beijing that year.