In this film, the athlete is a man of wild contradictions: there is Diego, the devoted son, hardworking and insecure; and Maradona, the character he invented to survive, arrogan, bullish, and on a downwards spiral.

It's all here: the great games, goals and great scandals. It teems with life and is unlike most biopics about a sports legend. That is, it actually delivers a pungent sense of the atmosphere surrounding him.

The tragedy of Maradona is that he was too simple to learn how to play anything other than soccer-and the sins for which he was punished, it turns out, were not really his, but ours.

It’s as if director Asif Kapadia and editor Chris King started off knowing they wanted Maradona’s story to be a cautionary tale and they’ve tried to bash the material to fit this mould.