Muhammad Goes to Hollywood: Michael Mann's Ali as Biopic

Biopics have tended to draw on and reinforce narratives already circulating in American culture. The "Ali story" that has been circulating resembles what Sacvan Bercovitch calls a "rite of assent," a process by which a radical element in American society is at first excluded and then reincorporated into a polity that itself has changed. Here, Doyle focuses on how Michael Mann's film Ali tells the story, and also looks at what that story leave out.