The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins (2026)

When Reggie Dinkins (Tracy Morgan) welcomes Oscar-winning documentary director Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe) into his home, it is a bid to redeem himself after a devastating NFL betting scandal sank his reputation and his chances for a Hall of Fame career. Reggie’s plan is to make an entertaining fluff-piece. But after a complete misfire of a feature sci-fi film, Arthur’s out for redemption too, but his way back is through Reggie. Arthur is intent on an invasive tell-all, not at all what Reggie had in mind.

You see, Reggie moved up and out of down-and-out NYC into pro-baller-ville because of talent and the support of first wife, now manager, Monica Reese-Dinkins (Erika Alexander). Despite Reggie’s infidelity – he’s on (ditzy) wife number two Brina (Precious Way) – Monica has stood by him and still manages his downward spiralling career. Initially, she’s not onboard with the documentary idea and intent on securing a position at an esteemed sports management agency. But when hiring manager Barry (Ronny Chieng) hilariously trashes Reggie and Arthur, Monica’s loyalty shines through and she urges Reggie to pursue his dream of redemption through Arthur’s film explaining to both of them that they have more in common than they think.

Creators Robert Carlock and Sam Means and producers Tracy Morgan, Daniel Radcliffe, and  Drew Scheid, take us along for the ride in Reggie’s life through the making of the documentary that also includes his almost-adult son, Carmelo Dinkins (Jalyn Hall), and his best friend and similarly disgraced third-string former NFL kicker Rusty Boyd (Bobby Moynihan). Like Reggie and Brina, Rusty’s lust for the camera leads him to practice his best “Jim from ‘The Office’ looks” designed to impress and capture maximum attention. But Rusty also comes across as a true friend who understands his good fortune in having a famous friend like Reggie who has allowed him to live in this basement and work as his clueless social media manager and personal librarian and archivist, overseeing a collection that at first seems only to hold Reggie’s teeth – baby, wisdom, and those knocked out during games.

Once Reggie clues into the fact that the cameras will never stop rolling, he develops a strategy to force Arthur to stop shooting: prompting his AI system to play Beatles songs for which they do not have the money to pay royalties. But he is so helplessly unfiltered that inevitably, Reggie uncensored is what the cameras capture. For instance, Reggie’s assertion that Cleopatra, Jesus, and George Washington were all black, and his insistence that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun “is an even worse guy with two guns”. But while Reggie, Brina, and Rusty are more than willing to play to the cameras, Monica, far more tight-lipped, forces Arthur to adopt other strategies like sentimental site visits designed to elicit nostalgia.

Unfortunately for Monica and Reggie, her trip back to her childhood park also leads to her use of air quotes at the mention of Reggie’s famed “food poisoning game” at Rutgers, the moment when his career took off. So, when Arthur goes on a quest to discern the reason for Monica’s air quotes, he turns to Reggie Dinkins’s Librarian and Archivist Rusty. Reggie’s faithful but not too smart bestie Rusty recalls that Reggie “blew up” after the incident and that Jim Carrey even played him on In Living Color (“it was a different time” he concedes), and with a complete lack of discretion, he hands over boxes of materials to Arthur, including Weird Al Yancovic’s parody record “Food Poison” sung to the tune of Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” (1990) – which Rusty is more than happy to sing for the cameras before admitting that it was not Weird Al’s best song.

Reggie Dinkins is a fun, playful, quick mockumentary with rapid fire jokes coming from many directions. It is a hilarious and layered comedy which is constantly swivelling between “behind the scenes” and “on-camera” moments which expose Reggie’s ceaseless thirst for redemption and his ineptitude at fatherhood, marriage, and the making of his own documentary. Tracy Morgan shines as the kind-hearted but unapologetic Reggie who has convinced himself that he must submit to Arthur’s clumsy and sneaky filming tactics to rebuild his reputation. The joyous, raucous, often laugh-out-loud moments largely come from Reggie’s and Rusty’s bumbling efforts to reminisce about and reconfigure their shameful shared past as the cameras roll.