The Dink

Pickleball is a fundamentally silly sport. There is no sidestepping this sporting reality. It shares most of its name with a chemically acidified cucumber, and the non-volley zone is called “the kitchen.” Hollywood’s first pickleball comedy, director Josh Greenbaum’s “The Dink,” named after a shot type unique to the sport, understands this quite well. A surprisingly brisk 90 minutes, the pickleball comedy embraces the quirky and shows no shame in doing it. Something is empowering about its chutzpah to unabashedly be a little dorky.

Dusty Boyd (Jake Johnson), a scruffy former tennis pro still living in his glory days too far into his 40s, picks up pickleball for the first time. The “glory days” of old weren’t even all that glorious; he tells lies to his only friend, PF (Aaron Chen), to live his lie. It’s a miracle he isn’t a drunk. He works for his dad, Chuck (Ed Harris), at a dying country club where the legacy tennis association risks losing courts to the rise of pickleball. The association’s bylaws, for some reason, allow for a special sport duel to decide the fate of courts. Treated with an ironic seriousness of war, the pickleballers and tennis players elect champions to decide how the courts will be used.

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