Claire Lewins’s 'I Am Ali', released to US cinemas and on-demand platforms last year, fails to deviate from a set path, mixing old ‘audio journals’ with recent interviews to provide the latest version of the Ali myth. The result is a strange thing, in which Ali’s past (always more interesting than allowed to be) haunts the kindly ghost Lewins’s film wants to create. In the process, her interviewees often try to re-accommodate a complex history in a simple present. At one point, Gene Kilroy, a former member of Ali’s inside circle, considers possible other paths had Ali not boxed. "He might have been a great lawyer," says Kilroy. "Could you imagine him with a Harvard degree out of law school, going before a jury? Wow! Case dismissed." But the reflex that prompts Kilroy to draw an alternative history remains deeply suspect: implicitly, Kilroy’s re-imagined path sees Ali becoming part of a white establishment without any of the difficulty or complexity of his Louisville youth and subsequent career. What psychic structures demand Ali be 'rehabilitated' like this?
