Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting, though you will want time at the end to discuss what it means to make the greatest film ever made about a man who is not likable, not redeemable, and not quite understandable — and to have it be one of the most powerful experiences cinema has to offer.

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JAKE LAMOTTA’S MEMOIR: THE SOURCE THAT SCORSESE AND SCHRADER MOSTLY LEFT BEHIND
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  1. The Memoir That Became a Different Film
    LaMotta’s 1970 memoir — co-written with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage — is a relatively conventional sports autobiography: pugnacious, self-justifying, concerned primarily with the boxing career and the mob entanglements, lighter on the psychological self-examination that Scorsese and Schrader would build the film around. Schrader has said he read the memoir and found it thin; De Niro found it in a bookstore and brought it to Scorsese. Did the memoir feel like enough source material for one of cinema’s great character studies, or a launching pad the filmmakers left almost immediately? And is Raging Bull genuinely an adaptation of LaMotta’s memoir, or a film that used his life as raw material for its own very different argument?
  2. What the Memoir Has That the Film Doesn’t
    LaMotta’s memoir is more interested in the mob and the fixed fight — the specific corruption of his middleweight title shot, the years of performing losses, the humiliation of the arrangement — than the film, which treats the mob largely as background. The memoir also gives more boxing detail: the specific opponents, the specific fights, the technical texture of what it was like to be Jake LaMotta in the ring. Did the film’s decision to subordinate the boxing and the corruption to the psychological portrait feel like the right choice? And is there a version of this story that keeps more of the memoir’s sports-biography texture while retaining the film’s psychological depth?
  3. The Self-Justifying Memoir vs. the Self-Indicting Film
    LaMotta’s memoir is written from the inside of its subject’s self-perception — Jake telling Jake’s story, with all the special pleading that implies. Scorsese and Schrader’s film is also told from inside Jake’s perspective, but it is structured to indict rather than justify, showing the viewer things Jake’s perspective cannot acknowledge about himself. Did the film manage to be simultaneously Jake’s subjective experience and an objective account of what he is? And which version — the memoir’s self-justification or the film’s structured self-indictment — gave you the more uncomfortable sense of being inside a consciousness that cannot see itself clearly?
  4. Schrader’s Script: Guilt, Violence, and the Catholic Imagination
    Paul Schrader brought to the LaMotta material his own Catholic-influenced preoccupation with guilt, punishment, and the possibility of grace—themes he explored in Taxi Driver and throughout his career. Schrader has described Raging Bull as a story about a man who needs to suffer, who finds the ring a place where punishment is organized and legitimate, and who is trying to pay a debt he can’t name. Did the film feel like it was making this theological argument? And does the memoir make available a reading of Jake LaMotta that the film’s Schrader-influenced framework closes down?

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CHARACTERS: THE BULL, THE BROTHER, AND THE WOMEN
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  1. Casting Call from the Bronx
    When Robert De Niro appeared as Jake LaMotta — twenty-five pounds heavier for the early career, then sixty pounds heavier for the decline, the body itself as an argument about what time and self-destruction do — did your mental image of the memoir’s Jake say yes, that’s the man, or something else? Same question for Joe Pesci as Joey LaMotta and Cathy Moriarty as Vickie. Who felt most like the figure the memoir describes, and who became the definitive screen version?
  2. De Niro’s Jake: The Body as the Argument
    De Niro’s physical transformation for Raging Bull — gaining sixty pounds for the later sequences, spending months training with LaMotta himself — is one of cinema’s most discussed acts of physical commitment. The memoir gives you Jake’s words; De Niro gives you Jake’s body at different stages of its trajectory. Did the physical transformation feel like an argument about what this man’s life does to him, or like an actor’s technique that occasionally called attention to itself? And is there something the memoir’s prose can give you about Jake’s self-perception that no physical transformation can replicate?
  3. Joey LaMotta: The Man Who Loves Jake Most and Pays for It
    Joe Pesci’s Joey is the film’s emotional center in many respects — the person whose love for Jake is clearest, whose patience with him is most extraordinary, and who is eventually destroyed by that love when Jake’s paranoia turns on him. The memoir gives Joey a more conventional supporting role. Did the film’s centering of the Jake-Joey relationship feel like the right choice — the relationship that reveals Jake most fully because Joey is the one person who tries hardest to understand him? And is Joey’s love for Jake the film’s most sympathetic element, or its most tragic one?
  4. Vickie LaMotta: The Woman Inside the Paranoia
    Cathy Moriarty’s Vickie is one of cinema’s great film-debut performances — a woman of self-possessed calm navigating a marriage to a man whose jealousy and violence are the constant weather of her life. The memoir gives Vickie considerably less interiority. Did the film give Vickie enough perspective to feel like a full person rather than primarily the object of Jake’s obsessive jealousy? Which version—the memoir’s brief account or the film’s expanded portrait—made Vickie’s decision to eventually leave feel most comprehensible?
  5. The Real Jake LaMotta: The Man Who Outlived His Film
    LaMotta lived until 2017, remaining publicly associated with Raging Bull for nearly four decades after its release. He gave interviews, performed stand-up, traded on the film’s image. Did knowing that the real Jake LaMotta was alive — that the bloated, self-dramatizing figure of the film’s final sequence was still out there, still talking about himself — change how you read either the memoir or the film? And is there something both versions get wrong about LaMotta that only the full span of his life reveals?

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SCORSESE’S FILM: BLACK AND WHITE, BODIES, AND THE GRAMMAR OF VIOLENCE
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  1. The Black and White Decision: Why Scorsese Shot in Monochrome
    Scorsese shot Raging Bull in black and white at a time when color was standard, for reasons that were simultaneously practical (to differentiate from color boxing footage), aesthetic (to evoke the period’s photographs and newsreels), and moral (to strip the violence of the glamour that color would have given it). The memoir has no visual equivalent of this choice. Did the black and white feel like the right formal decision for this material? And is there a version of Raging Bull in color that would have been a different argument — more seductive, more complicit in Jake’s violence?
  2. The Ring Sequences: Violence as Expressionism
    Scorsese’s boxing sequences are among cinema’s most discussed formal achievements — the ring shrinking and expanding, the sound design mixing crowd noise with preternatural silence, the blood and sweat rendered in slow motion, the violence alternately beautiful and nauseating. The memoir describes the same fights in the language of boxing memoir: technically, strategically, from inside a fighter’s perspective. Which version of Jake LaMotta’s violence felt most real to you — the memoir’s insider account or the film’s expressionist rendering? And is the film’s expressionist violence an argument about what violence actually is, or a stylization that makes it more artistically comfortable than it should be?
  3. The Home Movie Color Sequences: The Life Outside the Ring
    The film includes color sequences — shot to look like Super 8 home movies — depicting Jake’s domestic life, the family gatherings and pool parties that exist outside the ring’s black and white world. Did this formal distinction — monochrome violence, color domesticity — feel like a meaningful argument about Jake’s two worlds, or like a visual conceit that the film itself seemed uncertain about? And does the memoir make any equivalent distinction between Jake’s professional and personal life?
  4. The Final Sequence: Jake Alone with the Mirror
    The film ends with De Niro’s older, heavier Jake doing his nightclub act — performing himself, alone backstage with a mirror, reciting Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront. Did this ending feel like the right conclusion — Jake reduced to imitating someone else’s performance of a man who threw away greatness? And which version — the memoir’s account of LaMotta’s post-boxing life or the film’s staged final image — made the arc of his self-destruction feel most complete?

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THE FILM’S ARGUMENT: WHAT RAGING BULL IS ACTUALLY ABOUT
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  1. Is Jake LaMotta Redeemable? The Film’s Most Uncomfortable Question
    Scorsese has said he identified with Jake LaMotta — that making the film was partly about working through his own destructive tendencies, his own capacity for self-sabotage. The film offers Jake a moment of apparent recognition at its end but stops well short of redemption. Did the film feel like it was asking you to understand Jake, sympathize with Jake, or simply witness him? And is there a version of this story in which Jake LaMotta is redeemable — in which the arc of self-destruction can be stopped or reversed — or does the film suggest that some people are simply what they are?
  2. Masculinity and Its Self-Destruction: What the Film Diagnoses
    Raging Bull is one of American cinema’s sharpest portraits of a specific kind of male self-destruction — the man who is most fully himself in conditions of pain and combat, who cannot exist in the ordinary world of domestic life without generating the violence the ring once contained. Did the film feel like a diagnosis of a particular kind of masculinity, or like a portrait of one specific man? And does the memoir — written by that specific man about himself — have any awareness of the pattern the film identifies?
  3. The Greatest Film Ever Made: The Critical Consensus and What It Means
    Raging Bull was voted the greatest film of the 1980s by numerous critics’ polls, and it appears consistently near the top of the greatest-films-of-all-time lists. It lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Ordinary People in 1981. Does the critical consensus feel deserved to you? And is there a difference between a film being “great” in the critical sense — formally innovative, psychologically complex, morally serious — and a film being “good” in the sense of being a rewarding or enjoyable experience?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHOSE JAKE WAS MORE REAL?
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  1. The Memoir’s Self-Portrait: What LaMotta’s Own Voice Gives You
    LaMotta’s memoir gives you something the film’s third-person visual portrait cannot: Jake’s own account of himself, his own rationalizations, his own version of why things happened the way they did. Were there passages in the memoir where LaMotta’s self-justifying voice gave you something — a glimpse of how he actually understood his own life — that De Niro’s performance couldn’t access? Name one moment where the memoir’s first-person voice gave you something the film structurally couldn’t.
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Beyond What the Memoir Could Describe
    Name one moment where Scorsese’s direction gave you something LaMotta’s prose couldn’t: a ring sequence, a domestic scene, the specific quality of De Niro’s performance, a visual choice that made Jake’s psychology visible rather than merely legible. Which cinematic moment felt like the ideal version of what this story needed?
  3. The Biopic Question: How Much Does Accuracy Matter?
    Raging Bull takes considerable liberties with LaMotta’s actual life — compressing, inventing, rearranging, and in some cases directly contradicting the memoir. LaMotta himself was generally positive about the film despite these departures. Does accuracy to the source matter in a biographical film? And is Raging Bull more or less honest than the memoir about what Jake LaMotta’s life actually was — which is to say, can a film be truer to a life than the subject’s own account of it?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW FAR DOES THE BULL CHARGE?
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  1. A Film That Transcended Its Source
    Raging Bull is one of the clearest cases in this project of a film that has completely eclipsed its source — few people read LaMotta’s memoir, while Scorsese’s film is regularly cited among the greatest films ever made. Does this feel like an adaptation success or an adaptation displacement? And is there something the memoir gives you that the film’s overwhelming reputation has made harder to access — Jake’s own voice, his own version of himself, however self-serving?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the memoir, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best First-Person Self-Portrait of a Man Who Cannot See Himself Clearly; Best Black and White Cinematography in Service of a Moral Argument; Best Physical Transformation That Is Also a Formal Argument; Best Ring Sequence That Makes Violence Simultaneously Beautiful and Nauseating; Best Final Image of a Man Who Has Become a Parody of His Own Mythology.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — memoir or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they want LaMotta’s own self-justifying voice? If they want Scorsese’s formal achievement and De Niro’s performance? If they’re interested in the specific mechanics of mid-century boxing and its mob entanglements? And is there a case that reading the memoir first is essential—that knowing how LaMotta understood himself makes the film’s very different portrait of him feel more pointed?
  4. Order of Operations
    Memoir then film, film then memoir, or just one and done? Does reading the memoir first mean you watch the film noticing exactly where Scorsese and Schrader depart from LaMotta’s account — and feeling those departures as arguments? Does watching the film first give you De Niro’s Jake as the face that inhabits the memoir’s pages, enriching or narrowing LaMotta’s self-portrait? And is there an argument that the memoir is best read after the film — that seeing Scorsese’s portrait first makes LaMotta’s self-justifications feel more ironic and more revealing than they would on their own?
  5. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect memoir-to-screen translation” to “a Scorsese-Schrader film that used a boxer’s life as raw material for a very different and much greater argument about violence, guilt, and self-destruction,” where does Raging Bull land? And the question the film keeps circling without answering: is there anything inside Jake LaMotta that is worth what it cost everyone around him to be near it — and did either version make you feel that the answer to that question is yes?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your bull.