What's My Name: Muhammad Ali

It is the examination of Ali’s post-retirement life in the final hour of the documentary’s second part that is most stirring ... Seeing Ali in a physical fight with himself as he battles Parkinson’s Disease and the damage wrought by the ring is a jarring but necessary epilogue to his story.

Weighing in at two hours, 40 minutes and airing in one sitting, HBO’s What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali, is as thrilling today as it was in his yesteryears. ... What’s My Name doesn’t delve into its subject’s personal life, focusing only on his career in the ring and his activism outside of it. That’s more than enough to easily fill its extended running time.

By stripping most of the standard documentary crutches from his version of the story, Fuqua lays it all bare, and the resulting portrait is vividly detailed even as it’s understandably incomplete.

Fuqua revels in narrating Ali’s 1967 bout with Ernie Terrell, the man who made the mistake of not respecting this name change. ... The first part of this gripping three-hour biography ends with the revenge-seeker’s comeuppance.

Fuqua doesn’t seem particularly interested in tying events together--and using archival interviews exclusively makes that almost impossible--and so the result is a project that has a bit of the “then this happened, then this happened, then this happened...” structure that often makes bio-docs feel flat. The reason “What’s My Name” transcends that flatness is the vividness of Ali’s own voice and undeniable charisma.

It’s a celebration that, if not quite definitive, proves a stirring work of nonfiction assembly.