The Upper West Side deli where I meet Benny Safdie is filled with a particular kind of grumpy old-school Manhattanite. They’re the type of figure who has tended to populate the filmmaker’s movies: many of them neurotic, and more concerned with finding a means to their own ends than placating the people around them. With his brother, Josh, Benny has built a career on his fascination with these occasionally surly characters, often men on the downswing. For his first solo directing effort, The Smashing Machine, Safdie focuses on a somewhat unexpected figure: a sports champion, albeit one who is learning what it’s like to fail. “I want to know what it feels like to go through that,” he told me, over a plate of eggs, discussing the film. It’s an uncomfortable portrait—of who the winner becomes when he starts to lose.
Safdie has zeroed in on one athlete in particular: the mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr, played here by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Kerr—an absolute wall of a man, and thus a role befitting of Johnson—became renowned for his unassailable winning streak throughout the late ’90s and early aughts. The film’s basic plot resembles that of many traditional sports biopics. It follows the height of Kerr’s career, as well as his eventual battle with a painkiller addiction and his rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (played by Emily Blunt). But the emotional core was built upon Safdie’s animating question: “If you take somebody in a position like that, that’s really unrelatable, that’s the best in the world, but then they start faltering?” It’s a sly, sad turn in the other direction; observing Kerr’s descent, Safdie said, “allows you to learn something about yourself and the rest of the world.”
For a film of this size, it’s an unusual angle to take. The movie certainly has the biggest budget of any Safdie has directed, featuring two blockbuster stars angling for awards attention. And although Kerr is a well-known name in UFC history, his notoriety came years before the sport had gone mainstream; the film illustrates its early days of semi-lawlessness, when it was dodging a perception of being both seedy and violent. Safdie’s approach is warts-and-all, delving into Kerr’s personal setbacks and the small-scale, late-’90s griminess that defined his profession. Rocky this is not, and viewers will not exit theaters punching the air.
In fact, when I asked Safdie about his influences, he pointed to Rocky III as the clearest comparison for his film. “In Rocky III, he starts as the best,” Safdie said of the titular boxer’s journey. “Then what happens?” Rocky, in that movie, has to shed the trappings of fame to recapture his magic; in The Smashing Machine, Kerr has to shed his entire macho ego. Safdie’s unabashed desire to plumb a seeming invincible figure’s decline made Kerr a wise choice for a subject, but also a somewhat bold one. Whatever desire the audience might have to root for Kerr is undermined by his mounting failures in the ring and his growing friction with Dawn. And whereas with Rocky III audiences had two movies’ worth of time already invested in the protagonist, to most theatergoers, Kerr will be practically a stranger.
Johnson’s familiarity is key to bringing audiences close to Kerr and helps the film overcome its potentially alienating storyline. Unlike Kerr, Johnson might be the most famous professional wrestler who ever lived: a man who made his name in the WWE, a business that blended brute-strength athleticism with performance. He’s since evolved into a family entertainer with a sparkling smile—a larger-than-life hero that little kids can look up to, no cape-and-spandex necessary.
Kerr’s story attracted Johnson in part because he was interested in challenging his own broad popularity. He initially approached Benny and Josh—who, together, had become known for directing high-stress crime dramedies—with the idea of a Kerr biopic in 2019. It’s easy to see what drew Johnson to them; the Safdies had given Adam Sandler, the star of the gorgeous, stomach-ache-inducing Uncut Gems, one of his meatiest and most-acclaimed dramatic roles. But COVID disrupted any planning, and when the dust settled, the Safdie brothers publicly (and, according to Benny, amicably) split. Through it all, Safdie kept thinking about the Kerr project, eventually buying a copy of a yellow Nautica sweatshirt Kerr wears in an HBO documentary about his career and sending it to Johnson. “What really affected him about that was he was like, ‘Nobody’s ever asked me to do this. They all look to me for that other stuff,’” Safdie recalled of Johnson. The project offered a rare opening for the actor to take a risk.
That risk includes the fact that the role required a dramatic physical transformation—involving facial prosthetics to better resemble Kerr, which could’ve diminished his usual appeal. Yet the director resisted making Johnson totally unrecognizable. “You can still see Dwayne underneath it,” he said. “There’s a vulnerability that he allows,” which makes “you feel even closer to him.” That blend of actor and character works best when Kerr tries to get what he wants, be it a better contract or, in one of the film’s more wrenching scenes, better painkillers from an MMA-affiliated pharmacist. Seeing Johnson turn off his pro-wrestler, movie-star charm beneath Kerr’s heavy brow is somehow heartbreaking, and a little unsettling. “That was what Mark said when he saw it,” Safdie said, referring to Kerr. “He was like, ‘Wow, I know how hard it is to be that vulnerable.’”
The beginning of The Smashing Machine shows us what a force Kerr could be, while demonstrating his limits as a star. His approach of pinning and pummeling rarely made for good TV; as mixed martial arts fought for airtime, it began changing its rules to keep Kerr’s overpowering style from dominating. The game starts to slip away from him and Safdie gets his camera closer and closer, trying to home in on the human beings in the ring. The darkest stuff comes not with Kerr’s addiction (which is painful, yet sad and recognizable), but in how he pushes Dawn away and belittles her at home while he contends with his losing streak. At moments during the film, I was reminded of the Safdie brothers’ 2013 documentary, Lenny Cooke, which told the story of a top-ranked high-school basketball player who went toe-to-toe with a young LeBron James, only to go undrafted by the NBA and end up struggling to support himself. That endeavor to find one’s humanity after a slump is threaded through The Smashing Machine, too.
The intimate focus extends to the characters around Kerr, many of whom are played by real-life MMA fighters such as Ryan Bader and Satoshi Ishii, and the boxer Oleksandr Usyk. The film highlights mundane details of camaraderie behind the scenes of every fight, emphasizing the bonds between the fighters, who would often root for one another after their bouts were over. “They’re all friends. They all know each other. They feel bad because he gets hurt,” Safdie said. As the plot develops, we watch as Kerr goes from someone needing to stabilize his career, make money, and afford drugs to someone going into his final fight more engaged with the community around him. Sure, he still wants to win, but the pressures have changed.
Perhaps above all, the film demonstrates that Kerr, in spite of his brute force in the ring, is a vulnerable guy looking for love and attention. Despite the intensity of the fights we see, we’re meant to understand that this isn’t a sport in which the competitors hate each other. Safdie recalled watching a boxing match that captures this element. “This corner man is yelling at the fighter, yelling at him, yelling at him, yelling at him. And then at the end of his speech, the fighter just grabs the guy and kisses him on the lips,” he said. “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s basically saying, No, I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got this. And I just want to show stuff like that, where it’s just genuine care for each other.”
The Smashing Machine can hardly be called warm—it’s standoffish in a way that is, if not unfamiliar to Safdie’s fans, perhaps a more difficult sell to the average moviegoer. But Safdie has tended to seek out complicated characters, who strive for something better amid their harsh environments; I’ve left many of his films feeling shaken to the core yet undeniably moved.
Some of that earnest earthiness comes through in how Safdie interacts with the moviegoing public. When his first film, 2009’s low-budget Daddy Longlegs, was playing at a single theater in New York, Safdie stood by the entrance wearing a sandwich board, one that loudly proclaimed THIS MOVIE EXISTS! and bade passers-by to check it out. The Smashing Machine is in many more theaters than that, but Safdie is still donning the sandwich board and hanging out in lobbies. His advertising is just like his approach to storytelling: unselfconsciousness.
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