The film spends most of its time on extremes — the collector with 5,000 pairs in a storage unit he never visits, the riots outside limited releases, the machete found on the pavement outside a shoe store — and in doing so slightly misses its own story. The UPS man wearing chocolate Adidas is a throwaway line.

What actually happened to sneakers is quieter and more pervasive than anything the film's most colourful characters illustrate. The sneakerheadz subculture didn't stay a subculture that grew; it dissolved into everyday life. Luxury brands started doing design sneakers because their customers expected them to. Parents who never tracked a release date have strong feelings about their running shoes. The average wardrobe now contains more pairs than it did a generation ago, with no particular occasion attached to most of them.

The film frames this as a victory for the culture. It's more accurately the end of it as a subculture — and the beginning of something larger. When everyone is at least a little bit a sneakerhead, the culture stopped needing a name. As David Foster Wallace put it in his Kenyon commencement address: "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"