Who's the Real Mark Kerr? The Untold Story of The Smashing Machine

Here we go: Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the guy who usually punches earthquakes and trades quips with CGI, just took a big swing. In Benny Safdie's new drama 'The Smashing Machine,' he plays UFC and PRIDE legend Mark Kerr, and the performance is already getting early Best Actor buzz for next year's Oscars. Yes, that Dwayne Johnson.

What the movie covers

The film sticks with Kerr from 1997 to 2000, the period when he was mowing through opponents in MMA while his personal life was kind of on fire. Emily Blunt plays Dawn Staples, Kerr's girlfriend at the time. Safdie builds the story around the push-and-pull between the dominance in the ring and everything unraveling outside it: mental health struggles, addiction, and a relationship that was loving, messy, and often toxic.

It's based on the excellent 2002 documentary 'The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr,' directed by John Hyams — a bit of an inside-baseball favorite in fight circles. The movie doesn't feel like homework though; it pulls from the doc but makes some timeline tweaks to keep the drama tight.

How true is it?

• The broad strokes line up: Kerr's meteoric rise in MMA and the simultaneous toll of addiction and mental health issues are very real.
• The climax tracks with history: the film ends at the 2000 PRIDE finals in Japan, where Kerr loses to Kazuyuki Fujita. That matches the actual result.
• The film shows Kerr making progress on his addiction and trying to repair things with Dawn. In real life, Kerr and Staples married in 2000; they are no longer together.
• Timeline alert: the movie shifts and compresses events a bit. Standard biopic move, but the spirit of what happened is intact.

What happened to Mark Kerr after the movie's timeline?

Kerr kept fighting for several more years but never quite returned to that late '90s peak. He retired in 2009. Today he's regarded as a pioneer — one of the guys who helped popularize MMA before it was a glossy global product.

As for his sobriety, he said earlier this year that he is seven years clean. This part deserves to be in his own words:

"That took me a minute, because that's a reckoning. I recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of body and mind."

The movie doesn't flinch — by design

Kerr told Indiewire he wanted the uglier parts shown, not sanded down. Safdie, Johnson, and Blunt leaned into that, embracing a complicated, contradictory life rather than a tidy comeback story. It's not subtle, but it is honest.

'The Smashing Machine' is now playing in UK cinemas. If you're curious about whether Johnson can actually act when he's not chasing a giant gorilla across a skyline — this is the one to test it.