A fitting follow-up to The Insider, in a way. Where other Mann films show their protagonists and antagonists trapped in the insular world of their professionalism, these two films find their heroes subjected to the active hostility of an entire system. In Jeffrey Wigand’s case, it is the industry he served for his whole career, but for Ali, it is establishment society itself. As he says in one scene set during his forced suspension from boxing over his draft dodge, he fights the biggest opponent of his career, “the entire U.S. government.”

The opening segment of the film has remained blistering an incisive across all three of Mann’s edits of the picture. A collision of pop culture and social upheavals surround the rougher, primitive DV shots of the then-Clay training for his first fight with Sonny Liston. In only a few minutes, Mann situates Ali within the growing iconography of black visibility in the 1960s, all the while avoiding the tedious glut of explanation and oversimplification that dogs most biopics. By rendering all of this visually, Mann captures the sense of overwhelming change, dizzying on the ground level even as the overall march of progress is woefully stunted. Throughout, Mann tackles the usual beats of a biopic but through a visually oriented lens that renders what might otherwise been a list of details as a claustrophobic web of influences at work on Ali: the tension between his faith and the vindictive actions of his spiritual instructors, his lustful liaisons and impulsive marriages, constant federal surveillance, to say nothing of the pressure to win fights that everyone both expects and wants him to lose.

Will Smith has never been better than he is as Ali. Smith’s calculating screen presence is both subverted and fulfilled here: the actor’s own carefully crafted persona lines up eerily well with Ali’s own use of media to play mind games as much with viewers and readers at home as with his opponents. Where Smith ingratiates, Ali confronts. The casting in general is outstanding, from Mario Van Peebles’s weary and (justifiably) paranoid Malcolm X to Jon Voight’s outstanding Howard Cosell, but Smith manages to make the large cast of character actors revolve in his orbit.

This is my first time seeing Mann’s “definitive” cut, and I hope there’s truth in that naming as it feels like a complete, thesis-driven film for the first time. It’s a bit surprising that Mann cut out many of the actual fights, though it’s a smart move that firmly shifts focus from the ambling spirit of the previous cuts to root the narrative in the ongoing political tumult that Ali reacted against and embodied. Once, the Rumble in the Jungle finale felt like a reasonable place to leave off but also just kind of big event marker, his biggest fight to close out a bunch of other fights. Now, however, with so many earlier bouts excised, the Rumble is more clearly positioned as the culmination of the political arc of Ali’s life from his conversion and early successes through the Vietnam era. All of the elements were present in earlier cuts, but now the film foregrounds the event’s achievement of following Ali’s black pride back to Africa in order to firmly reestablish him as an American hero.