It's the 1930s, and as the people he cares for die or leave his village, young South African P.K. bonds with much older Doc (Armin Mueller-Stahl). A foreigner, Doc is detained when World War II starts, but from his prison cell he encourages P.K. to learn boxing. As he travels to different bouts, the adult P.K. (Stephen Dorff) forges relationships that anger the state's apartheid government -- but his reunion with his onetime schoolyard nemesis (Daniel Craig) may offer his biggest challenge yet.

The original version of the film ran 20 hours.[3] Nevertheless, several shortened versions of the film have been commercially distributed or publicly screened. Wenders was contractually obligated by his backers to deliver a standard feature-length film, so he edited it into the 158- and 179-minute American and European cuts; Wenders referred to these as the "Reader's Digest" versions of the film. Meanwhile, he and his editor Peter Przygodda secretly made a complete copy of the film negatives for themselves at their own expense,[11][12] and over the next year they worked on a 5-hour version of the film, then screened it at events across the country for over the next decade. A version similar to that shown at these screenings was released as a 280-minute trilogy.[13]A 4K digital restoration of the 287-minute director's cut was made in 2014 from the original Super 35mm camera negative, and was commissioned by the Wim Wenders Foundation and supervised by the director and his wife Donata, at ARRI Film & TV Services Berlin, with the support of the CNC. This version was screened for the first time in the U.S. at several art house theaters in the fall of 2015 as part of a retrospective tour of Wenders' filmography by Janus Films.[14] This version was in two parts and has an intermission at 2 hours, 15 minutes. It debuted on Television in the U.S. on Turner Classic Movies in July 2017.

There is a 239-minute letter-boxed and subtitled laserdisc release from Japan, and there are several unauthorized fan edits that combine portions of the aforementioned releases.[15]

In September 2019, The Criterion Collection announced a special edition Blu-ray and DVD of the film, featuring a 4K restoration of Wim Wenders' 287-minute cut, and was released on December 10, 2019 for both Region A & Region 1