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The picture (in which Joe Louis is called Joe Thomas) starts in an Alabama neighborhood very like Joe's native Buckalew Mountain country, dubbing in an 11-year-old pickaninny named Anthony Scott who bears a miniature resemblance to Joe in hue, texture and fungus-lipped impassivity, starts up a romance with a girl named Mary (who looks strikingly like Marva Trotter, the girl Joe really married), which causes Joe no end of embarrassment when he comes into the picture himself later. His cinema father, as Joe's was in real life, is a helpless invalid.
Joe Louis first made headlines when he won the light heavyweight championship in Chicago's Golden Gloves tournament. Thomas discovers his fistic ability while smashing baggage and a fellow baggagesmasher. Thomas, like Louis, is knocked out once on his way to the heavyweight championship. But nothing has been released by Louis' pressagent to give any color to the sequences in which Flora, a high yellow temptress, nearly gets Joe Thomas down for a long count, luring him into her night club, hailing him lyrically as "my magic lover," beseeching him to "hypnotize me, mesmerize me in your magic arms." Flora's foiled plot is to tear Joe down a little, vary the monotony of victory so her crooked pals can get better odds.
In the ring sequences, Joe blasts away several opponents, experiencing significant difficulty with the film's champ, Mickey McAvoy, a Max Schmeling sparring partner. As an actor, Joe Louis remains his historically inarticulate self and the world's champion heavyweight.