Name: The American Dream
Director: Anthony Marciano
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2026-07-24T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 122 min
Cast: Jean-Pascal Zadi, Raphaël Quenard, Gregory Defleur, David Clark, Josh Casaubon

The sports-agent movie is a strange little genre. It takes the person who is usually a footnote in someone else’s success — the fixer, the deal-broker, the voice on the other end of the phone — and hands him the story. The American Dream does this with two men who had no business being in the room at all: one stacking shelves in a provincial video store, the other pushing a cleaning cart through an airport terminal, both convinced that the fastest way out of a dead-end job runs straight through the National Basketball Association.

That is the joke and the engine of Anthony Marciano’s comedy, and it is also, improbably, true. The film follows two friends who decide the way to get rich is to represent basketball players, despite having no clients, no credibility and English held together with bluster. What they lack in every measurable qualification they make up for in nerve, and the picture is essentially a feature-length study of how far nerve alone can carry a person before the bill comes due.

Casting Jean-Pascal Zadi and Raphaël Quenard as the pair is the film’s clearest statement of intent. Zadi, who built his name on comedy that lets absurd situations play dead straight, takes Bouna, the cleaner with the wider smile and the longer con. Quenard, one of French cinema’s most restless recent presences, plays Jérémy, the video-store clerk whose motormouth optimism does most of the talking. Neither performer flatters his character. The film wants us to see the panic under the swagger, which is exactly what keeps the hustle funny rather than smug.

Marciano, who also wrote the screenplay, comes out of the broad French comedy tradition, and he keeps the register light even as the stakes climb from Amiens to Manhattan. His instinct is for the two-hander — the rhythm of a friendship that argues its way through every obstacle — rather than for the mechanics of the deal. That is a choice with consequences. It makes the film warm and fast, but it also means the basketball business itself stays comfortably in soft focus, admired more than examined.

The real Bouna Ndiaye and Jérémy Medjana were not invented for the screen. Starting in the 1990s they took over a struggling agency, Comsport, and built it into one of the most powerful representation shops in European basketball, eventually placing a generation of French players in the NBA and helping normalize the pipeline that now sends the country’s best prospects straight to the American league. The film sits squarely in the lineage that runs from Jerry Maguire — the picture that first made the agent a romantic figure — through every fake-it-till-you-make-it comedy since. Where those films usually have to invent a redemption, this one had the redemption waiting in the record.

There is a longer tradition at work too: Europeans measuring themselves against an American mythology they only half believe in. The title is not incidental. What Marciano is really filming is less the NBA than the fantasy of it — the exportable, durable conviction that reinvention is available to anyone willing to talk fast enough and mean it hard enough. The film is at its best when it treats that fantasy as both a con and a workable business plan, and refuses to decide which one it prefers.

What it does not quite resolve is whether it wants to interrogate that story or simply enjoy it. Agenting at the top of professional sport is a cutthroat, ethically slippery trade, and a movie built on charm has an obvious incentive to keep the sharper edges offscreen. The buddy-comedy frame flatters its subjects by design; the audacity that reads as heroic from one angle looks a lot like reckless improvisation from another. The picture is good company, but it rarely stops to ask what the players who were undersold, or the rivals who were outmaneuvered, or the people on the losing side of these deals might say. A comedy is allowed that blind spot; a film reaching for the word true in its premise invites the question anyway.

Raphaël Quenard and Jean-Pascal Zadi in the comedy The American Dream, 2026 — Raphaël Quenard and Jean-Pascal Zadi in *The American Dream* (2026)

Alongside Zadi and Quenard, the ensemble includes Etienne Guillou-Kervern and Josh Casaubon, with Gregory Defleur among the supporting players. Gaumont produced and distributes, with Quad Films and France 2 Cinéma attached, and the shoot moved between France and Canada to stand in for the American cities the two men set out to conquer. It runs a brisk hundred and twenty-two minutes and, to its credit, never outstays the joke.

The American Dream has been playing in French cinemas since mid-February and screened this northern summer at the Sydney Film Festival. Spanish audiences get it on 24 July, with a Russian release already behind it and a wider international rollout still forming; no United States or United Kingdom theatrical date has been confirmed. For a film about two outsiders who talked their way in, a staggered, improvised march around the world feels about right.