The film also follows Chamberlain's adjustment to life in Lawrence and his battle to help end segregation in the city, as well as the racism he experienced traveling for road games.

The film depicts the Jayhawks triple overtime loss in the 1957 National Championship Game to North Carolina.

[8] Willmott, a film professor at the University of Kansas, cast multiple alumni of the school in the film, including Kip Niven, Jay Karnes, Trai Byers, and former basketball players Scot Pollard and Justin Wesley.

Ben Sachs of The Chicago Reader said he “admired Willmott’s skill in executing the basketball sequences, which illustrate more vividly than in most sports movies how athletics can become an outlet for personal and professional anxieties.” [9] Loey Lockerby of The Kansas City Star wrote, “Willmott offers a creative and intriguing look at Lawrence in the 1950s.” In 2020, The New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote an article revisiting the film, praising it as “an exemplary, even thrilling, historical drama."

Brody said, "All of the subjects woven into the drama are treated substantially and considered in detail — especially the politics of race and of the nascent, and widely resisted, civil-rights movement.”[10]