Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes’ on Peacock, an Uplifting Pro Wrestling Biography That Raises More Questions Than It Answers

The One True Sport. The Sport of Kings. Fake fighting. Whatever you call it, professional wrestling is a fascinating art form, combining legit athleticism with scripted stories of heroism and villainy for a spectacle like no other. Few stars in the business today are bigger than Cody Rhodes. Son of wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes, Cody grew so unhappy at the massive “sports entertainment” company WWE that he quit and formed a rival company of his own — only to return to the fold in order to capture the one championship his iconic father could not. Does he overcome the odds and succeed at last? Does the stink of WWE honcho Vince McMahon render the point moot? That’s what I’m here to decide.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE – BECOMING CODY RHODES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The exterior of Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, where Cody Rhodes is prepping for the biggest match of his life, followed by footage of Cody walking through a fake desert wasteland to symbolize his journey through adversity to…triumph?

The Gist: As professional wrestlers go, Cody Rhodes has it all. He’s got an impeccable family pedigree, for starters: His father is the all-time Mount Rushmore–level wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes, while his older half-brother Dustin achieved fame on his own as the character Golddust. 

Cody’s got the talent, too. A legitimate high-school wrestling prodigy, he’s developed an in-ring style that combines WWE’s glossy showboating with the grittier, more demanding moves he picked up while working the independent wrestling circuit. He’s an electric speaker on the mic, an all-important skill in the blustery world of wrestling. He’s also blessed with movie-star good looks — he’s basically Wrestling Ken — and a beautiful family of his own, including his wife and consigliere Brandi.

But in the mercurial world of Vince McMahon’s WWE, all of this can only get you so far. 

American Nightmare tells the story of how, after an initial burst of promise, Cody becomes bogged down by terrible gimmicks, i.e. the outlandish personae wrestlers adopt — or are forced to adopt by their employer — in order to make the audience cheer or boo. In Cody’s case, these include “Dashing” Cody Rhodes, a dated “metrosexual” parody character, and Stardust, a flamboyant supervillain in bodysuits and facepaint who comes across like a pale shadow of the more successful Golddust. Slowly but surely, this makes the man behind the makeup miserable.

When the company refuses to let Cody revert to the Rhodes name in his father’s honor after Dusty’s tragic death, it’s the final straw. Cody does the unthinkable and forgoes what he describes as a lifetime of six-figure yearly salaries to go it on his own in the roughshod world of independent wrestling, literally performing to audiences of dozens in high-school gymnasiums to prove his worth. Successful stints in the prominent rival promotions New Japan and Ring of Honor follow, until this former also-ran is the biggest name on the scene.

It only gets bigger from there. Teaming up with wrestling brothers Matt and Nick Jackson, aka the tag team The Young Bucks, Cody dons his businessman hat and helps put together an event called All In. Drawing on wrestlers from everywhere but WWE, the show sells out a 10,000-seat arena in half an hour, a feat considered impossible for a non-WWE show until Rhodes and the Bucks thought it up and did it. 

With that success under their belt, the trio take things even further, helping to create the brand-new pro-wrestling company All Elite Wrestling, WWE’s first serious competition in two decades. But just three years into AEW’s run, Cody departs over “a personal issue” he refuses to discuss on camera, making him the hottest free agent in the game. Now WWE wants him back — so badly, in fact, that the infamously imperious Vince McMahon actually flies to Rhodes’s home to invite him back into the fold in person.

So the prodigal son returns, instantly becoming the company’s biggest babyface. (That’s wrestling patois for “good guy.”) Not even tearing his pectoral muscle clean off, leaving him with gruesome blood-red bruises, stops him from putting on a high-stakes (if horrifying to watch) match within a steel cage called Hell in a Cell. 

All of this endears him to the audience, who accurately view him as a guy who’ll risk everything to achieve his goals. Foremost among those goals: Capturing the WWE Championship, a feat that always eluded his legendary father. 

Pro wrestling being a scripted sport, you’d figure this would be exactly what happens. But no: For reasons known only to themselves, the WWE braintrust dictates that Cody lose to the seemingly unbeatable heel (i.e. bad guy) champion Roman Reigns at their biggest show ever, WrestleMania 39, at SoFi Stadium. So Cody’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story remains unfinished.

What Documentaries Will It Remind You Of?: WWE has an entire documentary unit that pumps out these impeccably produced profiles, so you can start there, or with the WWE Legends subcategory of A&E’s venerable Biography series. Meanwhile, narrator Stephen Amell currently stars in the flawed but engaging pro-wrestling drama Heels. And if you really want a wrestling doc about triumph over adversity that you can sink your teeth into, run, don’t walk, to Apple+’s one-season wonder Monster Factory, a mesmerizing docuseries about aspiring wrestlers in training.

Our Take: You don’t need to be a wrestling aficionado to recognize how compelling Cody’s hero’s journey is. Dusty Rhodes, the father in whose shadow he lives, really is as great a pro wrestler as anyone who’s ever lived, a working-class hero literally known as The American Dream. (This is where Cody got the “American Nightmare” moniker that gave the doc its title.) Dusty really did train a generation of the art form’s most successful practitioners — not only top dog Roman Reigns but also the gifted performers Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, and Cody’s fellow nepo baby Charlotte Flair — while his own son struggled. 

For his part, Cody really did change the game by quitting WWE, rebuilding his rep from scratch, reenergizing the burgeoning independent wrestling scene, proving all the naysayers wrong with All In, then doing it again with AEW. And dear god, that pec tear is terrifying to look at; wrestling against Rollins while that visibly messed up made for a legit all-timer of a match.

Cody himself is an outstanding screen presence. With his bleached hair and impeccably tailored suits, he’s like a Hollywood casting director’s dream of what a pro wrestler might look like. His public speaking, on display both when he inducts his dad into the WWE Hall of Fame and when he deliver’s the Dream’s eulogy, is justifiably acclaimed. In both the copious wrestling footage and the interview segments, he’s easy to watch.

The same can be said of this documentary…to a point. Directed in unimpeachable uplifting-sports-doc style by Matt Braine, who co-wrote it with Ben Houser, it’s slick, energetic, and heart-on-sleeve, the WWE recipe to a tee. It also weaves between the kayfabe (scripted, fake) and shoot (unscripted, real) worlds Cody inhabits in the seamless WWE fashion, treating winning championships and main-eventing WrestleMania as the accomplishments they are (you have to be legimiately good at being a pro wrestler to be trusted with those roles), but never outright saying that these outcomes are predetermined. (Cody only “fights” Roman Reigns for the championship in the sense that Margot Robbie fought Ryan Gosling for control of BarbieLand.)

This makes it all the more fascinating when the doc acknowledges Cody’s outside achievements, a rarity in the insular world the company has constructed for itself. If you know the business, seeing footage of The Young Bucks, and even glimpses of AEW owner Tony Khan and co-founder Kenny Omega, in an official WWE product is absolutely wild — all the more so because, other than some justified griping by Brandi and a minor shot about AEW being “a secondary promotion,” the rival outfit is treated with respect. (Meanwhile, Cody kremlinologists will no doubt pore over his assertion that he did not depart AEW over issues with money or any of his fellow wrestlers. I’m not sure what that leaves!)

But that’s just it: This a documentary about a current WWE wrestler, produced by WWE. That means you’ll be hearing a lot of the bizarre, cult-like lingo developed by Vince McMahon to describe the product he’s been selling for forty-plus years. For example, both the narration and multiple interview subjects, from Cody on down, use the sanitized word-salad phrase “sports entertainment” in place of “professional wrestling”; it’s a McMahon innovation you will never hear a human being not on WWE’s payroll say, unless they’re doing a bit.

Similarly, the adversity Cody faced during his initial WWE stint — bad gimmicks, bad ideas, writers and executives who refused to listen to him — is treated like some kind of natural phenomenon rather than the result of actual decisions made by people with names and addresses. The result is an onslaught of passive verbs that would make reporters about “police-involved shootings” blush, in which Cody is repeatedly fucked over by figures unknown.

But it’s a documentary’s job to make the unknown known, right? Like, when Cody says his demand to revert to “Cody Rhodes” from “Stardust” after his dad’s death “was met very much poorly” — met very much poorly by whom? Elsewhere, Brandi describes the situation that kept her husband down thusly: “Somebody said to somebody, ‘Not you.’” Who said it? To whom did they say it? Who are the somebodies? If “they” wouldn’t let Cody do what he wanted, who are “they”?

The answer, of course, is Vince McMahon himself, the man who for decade after decade has overseen WWE’s creative decisions on the most macro and micro of levels alike. The documentary treats this man like Zeus, a figure of might and legend who occasionally descends from his Stamford Olympus to bestow his blessings upon the worthy. Cody gets there eventually, but the years in which McMahon — who it’s widely believed bore a grudge against his one-time rival businessman Dusty Rhodes to the man’s dying day, even when Dusty worked for WWE — kept him down are glossed over.

This is to say nothing of the well-documented series of incidents in which McMahon engaged in illicit sexual conduct with his own employees, then paid millions in hush money to cover it up. Or about how he “retired” when this news broke, then forced his way back into the company to oversee its sale to perhaps the only potential buyer willing to leave him in charge, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor — which also owns UFC, run by the similarly politically reactionary and personally abusive Dana White. Or about his Succession-like power plays against his daughter Stephanie and her husband, former wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque, both of whom hold (or held, in Stephanie’s case) executive positions within the company. 

McMahon’s conduct (and of his years-long track record of creative bankruptcy; whatever juice the guy once had, it dried up 20 years ago) got me to swear off watching WWE shows unless and until he’s gone for good. Stand-up guy though he might be, the same cannot be said of Cody. All of this is worth exploring in a way an official WWE documentary can and would never do, yet it’s exactly this stuff that would make the doc worthwhile.  

(Side note: Some of McMahon’s many crimes are chronicled in the Vice docuseries Dark Side of the Ring, though even those filmmakers have reached enough of a détente with the company to utilize their contracted talent in some of their projects.)

Sex and Skin: No sex to speak of, but this is professional wrestling, so you get to see a lot of good-looking people in incredible physical shape wearing nothing but boots and colorful underwear. (This is an underrated selling point professional wrestling generally.)

Parting Shot: The main doc ends with a pensive Cody literally walking into the sunset — there’s that trademark WWE subtlety — although BTS footage rolls during the credits, showing Rhodes and the director wondering when they can stop filming.

Sleeper Star: Let’s give this one to Cody’s dad Dusty, whose influence looms over this film like Brando’s in The Godfather Part II. Having archival interview footage in which he speaks directly to the doubts and failures that plagued Cody’s initial WWE run is a great get for the filmmakers, and his avuncular demeanor instantly demonstrates why a whole generation of wrestlers loves being referred to as “Dusty’s Kids.”

Memorable Dialogue: Rhodes is always a sharp and eloquent speaker, but he’s at his best when engaged on topics that caused him emotional or physical pain. Having recently experienced a death in the family myself, I’ll be thinking of what he said about his father Dusty’s declining quality of life in his last days for a long time: “If you can’t live, you can’t live.” On the flip side, Cody can be funny, as when he calls the pectoral muscle he tore prior to a match in which the gruesome real-life injury was a focal point “a pec well spent.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. This is a can’t miss if you’re a Cody fan, for sure. But you’re a wrestling fan, it raises more questions than it answers, and those answers are the stuff of a truly great documentary still waiting to be made.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.