There are so many ways to make John McEnroe mad. You can give him a bad line call or a time violation, or remind him of the French Open title bout he lost to Ivan Lendl in 1984. Alternatively, you can make a film such as Borg vs McEnroe, which lionises him on screen and celebrates his heroic performance in the 1980 Wimbledon final. The film is not out until September and he is already calling fault. He is bemused by the concept and sceptical of the content. He dislikes the fact that it is being made at all. “I’ve never seen a good tennis movie,” the three-time former Wimbledon champion complained to Vanity Fair. “They all were terrible.”

You can argue with McEnroe as much as you like. The man invites it; he feeds on controversy like a mosquito on blood. In the past three weeks alone, he has been accused of downplaying the achievements of Andy Murray and claimed that Serena Williams – widely regarded as the best female player ever – is only as good as the 700th-ranked man. As a film critic, though, he is on far safer ground.

Cinema loves boxing and baseball, and these sports, by and large, appear to love them back. Knockout punches and home-runs, after all, provide neat movie resolutions. But tennis, for better or worse, is a long-form narrative. It ebbs and flows; it doesn’t naturally convert to bite-sized screen drama. When directors reach for a racket, the sport won’t play ball.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The tennis scene from Strangers on a Train.

McEnroe knows this at first-hand; he speaks from bitter experience. In 1979, he took a walk-on role in Players, a long-forgotten potboiler that tossed Ali MacGraw and Steve Guttenberg in amid the likes of Ilie Nastase, Guillermo Vilas and other hirsute professionals from the Jimmy Connors/Björn Borg era. More recently, he cropped up in Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon, in which Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst rustled up a desultory love match on the lawns of SW19. Happily, I’ve now largely forgotten this movie as well. Did McEnroe ever go so far as to shout “You cannot be serious!” at this amorous duo? If not, he surely missed a trick.

Make no mistake, Players and Wimbledon are bad films – muddled fanboy outings brandishing a VIP pass. But it is hard not to feel some sympathy for them, too. Both movies were guilty of loving tennis too much. They stuck it on Centre Court and let the story go begging, whereas history shows that the game only works well when it is kept as a cameo. Alfred Hitchcock had the right idea, framing tennis as a miniature thriller at the climax of Strangers on a Train. So did Jacques Tati, who installed it as a slapstick aside in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday.

Best of all are the films that cast tennis as a symbol of existential dread, or a mysterious portent of middle-class meltdown. It is a tennis coach who drives a wedge between the brittle married couple in The Squid and the Whale; a doubles match that articulates all the conflicts in Joseph Losey’s Accident. I particularly love the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums when Luke Wilson’s lovelorn ace, fresh from hitting 72 unforced errors, proceeds to remove his shoes and socks in the middle of a match. In this one small vignette, director Wes Anderson manages to make tennis look both laughable and heartbreaking. It is an exercise in futility – but it is also the most important thing in the world.

I am hoping the stakes will be equally high in Borg vs McEnroe, which charts the rivalry of two very different men. Who can say? It might even turn out to be properly cinematic. Because what was Sweden’s Borg if not a Bergman movie made flesh, rigorous and enigmatic; an austere art-house darling? That naturally leaves McEnroe in the role of the explosive New York drama, full of noise and fury, flirting with disaster. If the ingredients gel, this could be a good gladiatorial drama; the saga of two men who hated each other on court and loved each other off it. I suspect the film-makers have done well by casting young Sverrir Gudnason as Borg. He looks the part; he has the chops. But I’m less convinced by the prospect of Shia LaBeouf going the full actor’s nine-yards beneath a frizzy bouffant. Just look at him in the trailer, rolling about on the lawn, screaming at the umpire. “The ball was on the line! Chalk flew up!” It’s an impression that looks guaranteed to make the real McEnroe gag.

Then there are the physical requirements of the role. What made the 1980 Wimbledon final so thrilling was the way it pitted the American’s fiery attack against the Swede’s cool counter-punching. This was the perfect offence versus the perfect defence; the irresistible force against the immovable object. At the time, Borg and McEnroe were the best players in the world. How does one begin to replicate that kind of prowess on screen? “It’s difficult even for tennis players to re-enact what they did,” explains McEnroe. “So how in the hell is an actor going to do it on the court? It looks fake. They look like actors who can’t play. You see these guys, they go out there and they barely even know how to play tennis.” His solution, incidentally, is to intercut the actors with the real archive footage. Ideally, I think, he would like to watch the full, unabridged version.

This inevitably brings us to another problem. While Borg vs McEnroe bills itself as “an untold story”, it hinges on the outcome of a match that has long since become part of tournament legend. We know this tale back to front; we know how it ends (victory for Borg; 8-6 in the fifth). Basically, it is as much an untold story as the famous Battle of the Sexes, which drew a record-breaking TV audience of 90 million people. Except that now it transpires they are making a film of that, too.

Directed by the Little Miss Sunshine team of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, Battle of the Sexes rewinds the clock to unreconstructed 1973. It casts Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs, the chauvinist gadfly who challenged her to a duel. And yet Stone, for her part, was more drawn to the backstory; to the bizarre, sexist circus that preceded the event. Specifically, she sees this as a metaphor for a more recent contest – last year’s presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Battle of the Sexes.

“The parallels in this movie are pretty fascinating,” Stone told Out magazine. “We began shooting in the spring of 2016, when there was still a lot of hope in the air, and it was very interesting to see this guy – this narcissistic, self-focused, constantly-stirring-the-pot kind of guy – against this incredible, qualified woman.” History records that King clobbered the idiotic Riggs in straight sets. The US, sad to say, has travelled a long distance since then.

So perhaps Stone is on to something here. Perhaps that genuinely qualifies her film as “an untold story”. Because if a true-life sporting drama is to amount to more than an animated waxwork, it has to take us behind the scenes. It needs to find insightful new angles through its familiar material. It needs to expose the players, provide the wider context, force us towards a deeper understanding of the subject. This may well be the case with Battle of the Sexes, which was always about so much more than just sport. But I’m less convinced it applies to other tennis-themed film. In most cases, surely, the best way to understand the subject is simply to watch the match. Nothing, in the end, reveals a contestant so clearly as the contest itself.

Here is an example. As luck would have it, I am writing this article during men’s quarter-final day at the All England Club; periodically pausing to skip between courts, checking who is up and who is down. I watch Andy Murray suffer through five agonising sets. He is angrily lamenting every fluffed forehand pass; he is tottering about aboard an injured hip. I see Roger Federer, serene as an angel: his hapless opponent is going through all kinds of hell. I watch Novak Djokovic and he is in total disarray. His mind is in uproar and his elbow is sore and he can’t stay the course; he folds like Richie Tenenbaum. These tussles are fascinating. Each one a self-contained drama, building to a climax, like the final act of a Tennessee Williams play script. The players bring their baggage and backstories with them to the court.

I like watching films and I like watching tennis. And all at once I’m not convinced there is much difference between the two. During Wimbledon, the matches are arranged conveniently in a row on the screen, like a movie menu on Netflix. The time-frame, too, equates to that of a feature-length picture. A straight-sets drubbing, for instance, typically clocks in at around 90-minutes. They are hard, fast and unfussy, like High Noon or The Evil Dead. By contrast, a five-set marathon might last well over three hours. They are anguished and complex, like Barry Lyndon or Satantango. So McEnroe has a point, but he is also dead wrong. Good tennis movies are being shot all the time and contain all the ingredients that constitute a good drama. But they play out in real time; some are even screening today.

Borg vs McEnroe is out on 22 September in the UK (US and Australia tbc). Battle of the Sexes is out on 22 September in the US, 28 September in Australia and 20 October in the UK.