In March 1971, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier meet at Madison Square Garden in a bout billed simply as the Fight of the Century, and this film treats it as a proxy war for a divided country. Ali carried the hopes of liberals, militant Black activists, and the counterculture; Frazier, working-class and apolitical by comparison, became the choice of a more conservative America that wanted him to lose. The film builds that context through animation rather than static archival stills, reconstructing streets, arenas, and crowds to place viewers inside 1971 rather than just showing them footage of it. Narrator Arthur C. Clarke guides the account of how Ali's exile over draft refusal and his conversion to Islam turned a boxing match into a referendum on Vietnam, race, and patriotism. The fight itself, an undefeated champion against an undefeated challenger, gets its due, but the film's real interest is in why so much of the country needed one man or the other to win.