Love game: Will Smith leads as devoted father Richard Williams.

★★★★

OUT 19 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 138 MINS

DIRECTOR Reinaldo Marcus Green

CAST Will Smith, Aunjanue Ellis, Saniyya Sidney, Demi Singleton

PLOT Having written a 78-page plan to raise two champion tennis stars, Compton’s Richard Williams (Smith) trains his two daughters Venus (Sidney) and Serena (Singleton) to master the sport as kids. As they grow up, he stops at nothing to get them to the top — despite all the odds being stacked against him.

THERE’S A PARTICULAR heartbreak in watching a man being beaten up in front of his little kids. We see it happen early on here, after Richard Williams (Will Smith) confronts a local hood for flirting with his young daughter Venus (Saniyya Sidney). It’s not, we learn, the first time it’s happened to the oft patronised, oft dismissed, oft humiliated father.

King Richard, exec-produced by Venus and Serena, is a love letter to his dogged ambition, without which, they’ve said, they would never have become who they are. A biopic that doesn’t feel like a biopic, a sports film that doesn’t feel like a sports film, it’s a freewheeling but intense family drama, a tribute to the love that bound them — even if their father’s bullishness repeatedly threatened to break it all up.

Smith’s version of Richard Williams doesn’t care what anyone thinks, with an often unbearable bullheadedness: he’s the Terminator of tennis parents, dismissing those who displease him, unafraid of insulting those with power, at one point ending a meeting he doesn’t like by farting. He’s a cocktail of confidence and insecurity, walking with a hunch that betrays how he really sees himself. Smith immerses himself in Williams, wielding only minor make-up (mostly eyebrows) to look more like, well, the rest of us — so hardly Charlize Theron/ Aileen Wuornos levels of disguise, but enough to make it not seem like The Will Smith Show. It’s his best work in years.