If you can put aside the bland white guy named Steve pinging between scenes, stitching the various strands of story together with his white-guy need to learn martial arts badassery and save a beautiful Chinese girl from prostitution, then the otherwise all-Asian-cast, Bruce Lee biography-inspired “Birth of the Dragon” can be kind of fun.
George Nolfi’s period kung fu tale, set in an evocative 1960s San Francisco, is an elaborately fictionalized account of a real fight between the young, pre-legend Lee and a Shaolin master. It was an East-meets-Westernized showdown — seen by few, its details disputed ever since — that has since taken on mythic proportions as a turning point for the charismatic future star in developing a new kind of martial arts to introduce to the world at large.