A Review Of The Dink Movie Plus With Interviews With Stars And Director [SPOILERS]

The first mainstream movie written with Pickleball as its driving story theme hits the Apple TV streaming Service on July 17th. “The Dink,” starring Jake Johnson and Mary Steenburgen, features Johnson as a middle-aged tennis pro who comes head-to-head with the burgeoning “threat” to tennis clubs everywhere: Pickleball.

This is a spoiler-laden review and recap of the movie, along with some insight gleaned from interviews conducted in mid-July with the two leads (Jake Johnson and Mary Steenburgen) as well as with the film’s director (Josh Greenbaum) and its screenwriter (Sean Clements).

Click here for the Trailer, released in mid-June 2026. The movie itself debuted on AppleTV on July 17th; hopefully by the time you’re reading this you’ve had a chance to watch.

The movie, which is rated PG-13 and comes in at 1-hr, 42mins, is a well-crafted, well-moving comedy that has some unexpected romantic comedy moments and some slapstick sports moments that one may expect from a movie that is written around a sport. It includes a slew of comedic character actors and surprise guest star appearances, and as a whole the movie turns out to be less about pickleball and more about the main character (Dustin “The Hammer” Boyd, played by Johnson) confronting multiple personal daemons, the least of which is a decades-long lie he’s told himself about the demise of his promising youth tennis career at the hands of a young Andy Roddick.

Both the director and screenwriter are pickleball players, had the same introductory pickleball experiences many of us have had, and their relationship to the sport helped drive the movie. Says Director Greenbaum, “Three or four years ago, as pickleball was growing, my wife and I were like, ‘we should try it.’ We did the thing: ordered terrible paddles on Amazon, played on small courts in Burbank, and got hooked immediately. Our first night out, we got completely dominated by two 60 yr-olds.”

Screenwriter Clements’ playing experiences essentially shaped the writing of the movie. “I grew up playing tennis, and was very passionate about the sport. I continued playing after a break later in life, eventually got hurt, and then tried pickleball. I found that I could play for longer and have fewer injury problems. That brought me into the world; playing with friends, experiencing open play, participating in mixers, and the like.” Clements used his personal experiences, and the often-hilarious encounters we’ve all had (some of which I wrote about in this space in June 2023 describing the Characters you see in Open Play), to shape the initial draft of the screen play.

The basis of the relationship between Steenburgen and Johnson’s character was driven by the older demographic that dominated the sport 4-5 years ago. Continues Clements, “When I started playing, when you went to open play, the players were generally old, a lot older than it is now. In setting out to make this movie, I wanted to show that community, with a lot of older people participating. I felt young at these open plays, so that was something that was the seed of writing the movie. It was such a funny dynamic that I was the young, awesome guy despite being in my 40s.”

From there, an existing relationship between Clements and lead actor Johnson that led to the movie starting to take shape. Says, Johnson, “Sean and I are old friends; we were getting a lunch and he had an idea. We talked about it, and both decided his idea was good enough and fun enough for a movie. We thought there was a chance, because it was Pickleball, that it would have a built-in audience.”

After writing the initial draft, Clements approached legendary comedy actor Ben Stiller and his partner John Lesher [another producer on the movie] with the script. Continues Johnson: “They liked it, wanted to produce it, and Stiller wanted to play the doctor character. Once we knew Ben was in, we started to get really excited.”

With Jake on board as the lead, and a big name behind the movie in Stiller, the group had momentum. They found their director in Greenbaum (he recalls, “When the script came across my desk, with Stiller and Jake involved, I was really interested.”), then needed to find their “Candace.”

As it turned out, Mary Steenburgen was a not only a pickleball player, but she loves country music (a central part of the 2nd act of the movie), so she was a great fit. Says Steenburgen, “I had just started playing pickleball before filming began, and I fell in love right away. I’m much better now, 2 years onward.” Steenburgen is a big enough fan of Pickleball that she’s been to multiple pro events, having visited Indian Wells a few months ago and just last week took in the MLP Mid-Season Tournament, getting in an interview with Michelle McMahon on Pickleball TV. What did Steenburgen think of Grand Rapids? “It was madness, and I loved it. I didn’t know what to expect and it was more fun than I could have imagined.”

The main character’s father (“Chuck Boyd,” played by straight-man Ed Harris) is the owner/general manager of a ritzy LA-based tennis club who, like many tennis clubs around the country, has a loud and growing set of pickleball players (who are represented here by “Skip,” played hilariously by stand-up comic Patton Oswald). Harris has no interest in Pickleball, and delivers well the anti-pickleball lines that tennis players and haters are well versed at repeating.

I asked Johnson specifically if it was tough to play off of Harris, a 4-time Oscar nominee not exactly known for comedic roles. Says Jake, “Your instincts are right; he hasn’t done a ton of comedy. He’s very intense and viewed the process much differently than I. He brought seriousness and gravity that was nice; a different actor would have made the scenes worse.” I kept waiting for Harris to break all movie; he never does, and Johnson plays off his seriousness exceptionally well throughout.

Despite his hatred of Pickleball, Harris’ character Chuck is bound by the bylaws of his own club to have a “duel” between a representative of the tennis players versus a representative of the pickleball players to decide whether he would have to cater to the pickleball community’s whims and build more courts.

One of the big worries the pickleball community seems to have with this movie is simple: is this just one big opportunity for Tennis to denigrate Pickleball? I asked Clements this exact question (albeit worded a bit less eloquently), and he laughed: “At my core, I believe we can have peace between these two communities. Both sports can be fun and good at the same time. This is not a tennis movie designed to disparage Pickleball. However, it’s not wrong when lifetime tennis players say, ‘Pickleball is dumb looking.’ Both of these things can be true at the same time.”

Dusty wins the in-house tournament to represent the club in this “duel” and to finally win the approval of his father, but injures his wrist celebrating his victory. His rehab? He is recommended by the family doctor (played by movie Producer Ben Stiller in a funny, if crude, set of cameos) to play pickleball as a way of rehabbing his wrist, which he reluctantly does. He goes to an open play event, where he meets Candace (played by co-lead Mary Steenburgen) and her playing partners Gail and Judy, and predictably gets schooled. He continues to play, becomes friends with Candace, and then the movie takes a somewhat unexpected turn.

Candace and Dusty become friends and confidantes, and begin to get close enough that fans are beginning to wonder if the movie indeed was going to turn into a conventional rom-com, though this time in a “May-December” kind of way. In case this wasn’t completely evident from watching the movie, the two leads end up in Candace’s apartment watching, what else, “The Graduate,” which is the most successful movie featuring such a relationship that didn’t involve the “ick factor” of a Woody Allen production. Unfortunately, their relationship hits a snag, as Dusty has misread Candace’s intentions, but the duo rekindle their friendship in time for the big match and the movie’s climax in the third act.

The final scene of the movie ends up featuring Chuck hiring none other than Dusty’s childhood nemesis Andy Roddick to represent the tennis side of the house, while Dusty has come to embrace both the sport of pickleball and its converts and chooses to compete for them in the final match. The two play, and Roddick has to severely hold back his 5.0-level pickleball skills in real life to lose the match and give the pickleballers a win to finish the movie.

(Side-note: if you’d like to laugh for 20 minutes, listen to Andy Roddick’s podcast “Q and Andy” from this week, part of his regular Tennis-themed “Served” podcast, where he has on Jake Johnson for 20 minutes and tell stories from the making of the movie. Absolutely hilarious).

In the original drafts of the screenplay, Clements wrote the final match opponent as a “Roddick-like figure.” It ended up being Stiller’s idea to, well, just make it Roddick himself. “Stiller was not really a pickleball guy, but is a huge tennis fan for sure [Stiller famously was involved with a Nick Kyrios fan-engagement video a few years back while attending the Indian Wells ATP event], When Ben read the script, he was like, “just make Roddick” the antagonist at the end. The fact that Andy
had done Pickleball in the past made us hopeful that he was open to it.” Roddick, who has participated in two of the Pickleball Slam made-for-TV events in the past, showed up to film his scenes a bit out of pickleball practice, and per Clements “stayed for 3 hours to hang out and play, and to get all the film angles correct.”

Both Johnson and Steenburgen got to hit with Roddick extensively, both on screen and in between shots. The team also employed a slew of LA-based teaching and playing pros, including the likes of Beth Bellamy, Wes Burrows, and Gabe Joseph, and both actors spoke highly of the instruction and experiences they had playing with all the top players. Says Johnson, “It was a real honor to play with them all; they’d give you little pointers to help with your game. Plus, seeing the speed at which the pros were playing was crazy. I learned the most about levels of the game, the better you get and the level of play.”

The final scene is hilariously narrated by another famous tennis legend-turned hesitant pickleball star in John McEnroe, who acts as if he’s in the Wimbledon booth calling the match while he noshes on a continuing stream of snacks. This gag made me laugh out loud, and I asked Greenbaum in particular if this was a call-back to something in McEnroe’s past. “The food gag was just an absurd flourish. It’s already absurd that he’s there, so let’s push the absurdity even further.”

The final match fittingly ends with a massive dink battle, with Johnson finally embracing the strategy of pickleball to come out on top. In the end, “The Hammer” is given a new nickname by his peers: “The Dink.” A nice tie-back to the sport and the movie’s title.

Tune in to AppleTV to watch. Click here for the Trailer. The movie officially released to the public on July 24th.