Hollywood Ali: Will Smith tries to pack a punch embodying the greatest, and most controversial, fighter ever.

• Author: Barra, Allen
• Position: Arts

HE FOREVER BLURRED THE LINES BETWEEN SPORTS, politics, and culture. In the ring, boxer Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal in 1960 and the world heavyweight title in 1964. Within 10 years, Clay met Black Muslim activist Malcom X, converted to Islam himself, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, defied the draft at the height of the Vietnam War for religious reasons, was stripped of his title for it, and won it back.

The saga of the fighter called "The Greatest" comes to the big screen with the December 25 release of the movie Ali, starring Will Smith. "Is it going to be controversial?" asks screenwriter Eric Roth. "Are you kidding? It's about Muhammad Ali. Do you really think all the things he stood for don't matter anymore? His name is still a lightning rod for hot-button issues in American society."

Director Michael Mann aims to stay true to Ali, a man forged by race, religion, strength, and showmanship. "We show him at his best, defying the U.S. government, refusing to be inducted into the Army, and losing three-and-a-half years of his career for it," he says. "We also show him at his worst, taunting and insulting his black opponents and cheating on his wife. This isn't an idealized Ali."

The daunting subject matter and the potential for controversy kept the idea of a movie about Ali kicking back and forth for more than a decade. Mann--who tackled the deceptive practices of big tobacco in directing the fact-based 1999 movie The Insider--took on the project. What he had agreed to was a film about an icon who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, had passed Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ to become the most written-about human being in the world's books and periodicals.

Still, the movie almost didn't get made. Last fall, Sony Pictures, worried about the budget, actually pulled the plug for a brief time while Mann and Smith scrambled to get the costs down; both believed in the project enough to assume partial responsibility for costs.

But Smith's main responsibility is in front of the camera, to shed his rap-lite, funnyman image and capture the essence of Ali. "The pressure is on Will," Mann says, "because he has to convince you right out of the locker room, bam, first impression."

Wisely, Smith didn't see his job as an impersonation. "What I'm trying to do is an interpretation of the man on the inside that...