DN:FILM What’s My Name | Muhammad Ali

Eyes wide, mouth agape, a fist pounding the table, Muhammad Ali is unleashed, free-associative verse tumbling from his unstoppable maw. Harnessing vainglory and the gift of gab, Ali is showboating, again, his audience of press and promoters rapt and laughing. And then he winds down, admitting exhaustion, the pugilist at rest.

The sudden calm is a rare state for the heavyweight champ, the self-anointed Greatest, whose taunting poetic prattle—“I’m so bad, I make medicine sick!”—earned him both infamy and adulation. “He talks too damn much! Put your fist in his mouth!” Ali recalls a ringside heckler shouting in the HBO doc WHAT’S MY NAME: MUHAMMAD ALI, a gripping, emotional trip through the fighter’s professional life told almost exclusively in his own words. It’s a beautifully edited stream of vintage press conferences, TV and radio interviews, with added color from managers and trainers, magazine covers and newspaper headlines (“He could never keep his big mouth shut,” reads one).

The two-part, nearly three-hour doc, directed by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “Southpaw”) and co-produced by LeBron James, naturally pops with exhilarating fight footage, chronologically presented, from Ali winning an Olympic gold medal to his 1964 pro bout at age 21 upsetting Sonny Liston (“If they put a mouthpiece in his mouth so he can’t talk, I’m going to kill him,” Liston says). It goes on to the spectacles of the Rumble in the Jungle (Ali vs. George Foreman, captured in the Oscar-winning doc “When We Were Kings”) and the Thrilla in Manila, the epic match against Joe Frazier, ending with his last fight, the defeat by Trevor Berbick in 1981, after which a tired Ali sighs, “Father Time got me.” His final record: 56 wins, 5 losses, 37 knockouts.

If the former Cassius Clay was an icon in the ring, he was perhaps more of one outside it. He used his supersize personality and cascading eloquence to speak out for civil rights and Islam and against segregation and the Vietnam War, refusing induction into the Army, which cost him his heavyweight title. This keen portrait of social decency and athletic supremacy is also a voyage through late 20th-century history and culture, in which an African-American became an international hero. Later, once Ali is enfeebled by Parkinson’s, it’s hard to watch the man's ferocious edge sanded down, the mumbling, the trembling, the motormouth at idle. Yet what keeps shining through is his basic humanity and, yes, humility.

On HBO starting May 14