Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rowdy’ on Freevee, a Documentary Look at NASCAR Driver Kyle Busch

On the NASCAR circuit, Kyle Busch is a love-him-or-hate-him kind of guy–but it’s clear you’re going to have an opinion on him. The winningest driver in NASCAR history, Busch makes it hard to look away. In Rowdy, a new feature-length documentary on Amazon’s Freevee service, we get an inside look at Busch’s career, starting with a 2015 crash that threatened to derail his chase for his first Cup Series championship..

ROWDY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kyle Busch holds the NASCAR record for most all-time wins across all of the company’s race series. He’s a risky, wild driver–something that’s earned him the nickname that gave this documentary its title. In Rowdy, we get a semi-autobiographical look at the driver’s life and career, starting as a teenage racer and leading up to his first Cup Series title.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s a pretty standard single-athlete-focus sports documentary, but if you squint your eyes hard enough, maybe you can picture Days of Thunder.

Performance Worth Watching: The movie smartly works to ground things in emotion from the start, with Busch’s wife Samantha recounting her experience watching his 2015 crash while 27 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child. It invests the viewer quickly in the story.

Memorable Dialogue:”The thing you want to be able to do is be well-liked when you retire,” Busch is quoted as saying in on-screen text at the beginning of the movie. “I know right now I’m not close to retiring, and I’m not close to being liked.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Single-athlete-focus documentaries tend to follow a pretty standard formula. We’ll introduce the athlete, and perhaps explain why they’re misunderstood by fans. We’ll establish a few personality traits–their single-minded drive to compete, their awing of family and friends with youthful talents, and so on. We’ll hone in on a singular moment of adversity, and then we’ll show how the athlete bravely overcame it.

Rowdy, Amazon’s first foray into NASCAR documentaries, hits every one of those notes. We start with a severe crash that Busch suffered in the 2015 racing season, one that could’ve ended his career or worse. We then rush back to his childhood–a precocious, cocky teenager who grew up around racing and debuted on the track at 16, something that precipitated a rule change to keep under-18 drivers out. Busch explains living in the shadow of his older brother, fellow NASCAR driver Kurt Busch. Along the way, there’s a mixture of on-screen interviews with Busch himself and a series of racing and media personalities contextualizing who he is and what he’s doing.

All this is to say–Rowdy’s not out here to reinvent the wheel. It’s a straightforward movie that seeks to paint Busch in the friendliest light, repackaging his flaws into character details.

That said, it mostly works. Rowdy’s far from the first documentary to let an athlete tell their own story in a favorable light–frankly, most do–and Busch is clearly aware of his public image. If you’re a fan of racing, you’ll probably find something to enjoy in Rowdy, which–like its subject matter–moves fast, takes every angle it can get, and doesn’t really care what you think anyways.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re a NASCAR fan–whether or not you like Kyle Busch–Rowdy is a fun, smartly-constructed and capable piece of storytelling.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.