‘The Smashing Machine’ Is a Triumph For Dwayne Johnson—and for the Seminal MMA Documentary That Inspired Benny Safdie’s Film

It sounds like it would’ve been a great scene. Yet the DNA of the original The Smashing Machine is also unmistakable, I would argue, in another successful fight film from the late aughts: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, from 2008, with Mickey Rourke as a fictional, washed up pro wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson. So much of The Wrestler—from the way cinematographer Maryse Alberti’s handheld camera perches just behind Rourke’s broad shoulders (a far cry, stylistically, from any of Aronofsky’s meticulously blocked earlier films) to the locker-room scenes to the moment when The Ram disposes of his steroid vials—mirror visual and narrative beats from The Smashing Machine.

Rourke’s whole vibe in the film, that of a lovable galoot with a slightly chaotic personal life, seems to match Kerr in the doc to a T. The 1999 wrestling doc Beyond the Mat is often cited as an influence on The Wrestler, though Hyams thinks he remembers either Aronofsky or Rourke mentioning The Smashing Machine in one interview or another. That may be apocryphal, but all I know is that when I started watching The Wrestler a few nights removed from a viewing of Hyams’ The Smashing Machine, my wife, who hadn’t seen either movie until that week, asked, unprompted, “Is this that same movie from the other night?” (To further these eerie parallels, it was announced back in January that Aronofsky has plans to direct Dwayne Johnson in another A24 feature, entitled Breakthrough.)

For his part, Hyams says he isn’t miffed by any of the later developments with The Smashing Machine, even though he isn’t directly profiting from them, having long ago sold off his rights. “About a year ago when [the scripted The Smashing Machine scripted version project] started to sound like, hey, this is kind of a real thing and Benny Safdie is going to make it,’ Hyams says. “When I heard that, I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to actually make a good movie out of it.’”

“I thought, well, if Mark could cash in on any level with this and maybe just have people talk about and remember what he was in his career, that would be great,” Hyams says. “This guy totally opened himself up to us in a very extreme way, and in a way that was, could’ve been, quite frankly, potentially very threatening to his livelihood.”

Early on, Hyams had made a deal with Kerr that if Kerr opened himself up completely and let them shoot everything, then they would allow Kerr “complete veto power” over the movie. “We had an agreement,” Hyams says, “where we told him, ‘If there’s anything in there that you don’t want in there, then it’ll be out.’”

The edit itself took two years. Throughout the process, Kerr and a succession of new managers pleaded with Hyams and Greenhalgh to show them the footage—which wasn’t an outlandish request for a movie that could, in fact, affect Kerr’s career. But Hyams was reluctant to show them anything before they’d gotten the cut just right, knowing that he’d only really get one shot for Kerr to see it in its proper context.