In 1974, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman meet in Kinshasa, Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle, a fight nearly everyone expects Ali to lose. The film built from footage shot at the time spent two decades unfinished before its release, and that gap shows in the depth of access: training camp footage, the three-day delay after Foreman is cut in sparring, and the accompanying music festival featuring James Brown and B.B. King. Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who covered the fight as journalists, appear as latter-day interview subjects picking apart what Ali's rope-a-dope strategy actually meant, both as boxing tactics and as theater. Don King's promotion, Mobutu Sese Seko's financing of the spectacle, and the crowds chanting Ali's name in the streets of Kinshasa all get screen time, situating the fight inside the politics of a newly independent Africa staging itself for the world. The eighth-round knockout, when it finally comes, plays as the payoff to everything the film has spent its runtime setting up.