Benny Safdie wants to challenge our expectations of the traditional sports movie. His first solo directorial outing without his brother Josh, “The Smashing Machine” is a biopic that zigs when you expect it to zag, parries rather than jabs, feints before delivering a punch.

“The Smashing Machine,” about mixed martial arts fighter and UFC heavyweight champion Mark Kerr, played by an almost unrecognizable Dwayne Johnson, takes a shape and form that is not what we’re used to in traditional sports movies. It’s more like a jazzy improvisation on the formula that references familiar rhythms but marches entirely to the beat of its own drum, and it’s the kind of film that forces the audience to wrestle with what, exactly, we want to see from these kinds of narratives — tragedy or triumph? Safdie o

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