This side of Kobe, the inquisitive entre­preneur, is a relatively new development. Early in his rehab from the knee injury, he was limited to 45 minutes a day on the exercise bike, which left him 23 hours and 15 minutes to focus on something other than basketball. It was hell. “You get this feeling that you’re living without a purpose,” says Bryant. “And that’s not O.K.” So Bryant watched Modern Family with his kids and read business tomes and spent long hours talking with people he admires and filling a series of notebooks. He’s on his fourth now. “Just nothing but sketches and drawing and org charts and direction and all this s---. Conversations I’ve had with muses, how they built their company, notes and all kinds of s---.” (One of Bryant’s conversational fallbacks is swearing in situations where swearing doesn’t necessarily seem warranted. It is a way to soften himself, an attempt to bridge the gap he assumes exists when talking to people unlike himself.)

“You know how it’s been hard for Jordan in retirement?” says one GM. “It’s going to be way worse to be Kobe. At least MJ likes to golf and play cards.”

Of late, Bryant has become obsessed with obsessives, and he devours biographies of iconoclasts. Often he’ll divulge some factoid like, “Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t break onto the art scene until he was 46 years old? Forty-six?!?” Bryant recently cold-called Apple exec Jonathan Ive and Oprah Winfrey, among others, asking for business advice. He is curious in a manner most athletes aren’t. He wants to know how and why things work. Last year he formed Kobe Inc., hiring away creative talents he admired from companies he’d worked with. (Bryant, who got his killer instinct from his strong-willed mother, hired Andrea Fairchild, formerly of Gator­ade, as his CEO.) Among those Bryant ­idolizes—Steve Jobs and Bruce Lee, for ­instance—there is often a common theme. They are outsiders. They buck the system. Succeed against the odds. In their lives Bryant sees not just road maps but validation.

Earlier this year Bryant heard a story about Michael Jackson, one of his idols. It was about how, before Thriller came out, Jackson was obsessed with the Bee Gees, and in particular their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which then was the best-selling album of all time. Determined to eclipse the Bee Gees, Jackson began listening to Saturday Night Fever over and over. Such was his obsession that for two years straight, Jackson told friends, he listened to the album 10 times a day, until he knew every note, every beat. Until he’d internalized it, deciphered its magic and taken it for his own. A year later Thriller came out. It went on to sell more than 60 million copies and become the best-selling album of all time.

When Bryant first heard this anecdote, he was ecstatic. “I f------ love that story,” Bryant said. Here, crystallized, was everything Bryant held dear: the value of work ethic and passion and obsessive quests, all doused in mythology. Did Jackson actually listen to Saturday Night Fever 10 times a day, or was it more like five? Did he do it for two years, or two months? These were not questions Bryant asked. Better to build up a myth than tear it down.

Chris Ballard/Sports Illustrated

The man who told Bryant that story about Michael Jackson was 39-year-old director ­Gotham Chopra. The son of New Age guru Deepak Chopra, Gotham grew up amid his own surreal media bubble: on TV as a boy, shot by paparazzi as a teen, published author while still in college. His childhood was as surreal as Bryant’s, if in a different way.

Kobe and Gotham met two years ago, through a mutual friend, and first bonded over comic books. Bryant was interested in documenting his comeback from an Achilles injury. Gotham, a personable man with big brown eyes—and a die-hard Celtics fan, something which Kobe loves to needle him about—signed on, even though the project was nebulous. “Hey, if Kobe wants you to film, you film,” he says.

Then Kobe’s knee buckled, and the movie had to become about something else. So it became about Kobe’s ­inspiration—his “muses” as Bryant calls them. Gotham has now spent roughly 70 days with Bryant over the course of more than a year. He has reams and reams of footage, and a team of young, bearded, energetic twenty-somethings sifting through footage day and night back at a second-floor apartment office in Santa Monica that feels more like a tech start-up.

The movie is supposed to air on Showtime in early November, right after Kobe’s return. Gotham says he’s about 95 percent done filming and desperately needs to be in the editing room. But Kobe said, ‘Come to Shanghai,’ so Gotham came. This is how a lot of the filming has gone. Gotham will get a text at 5 A.M. “Meet me in Newport Beach at 6 A.M.” So Gotham grabs his crew and speeds toward the coast, no idea what he is about to film. Sometimes he receives a text halfway there from Kobe’s personal assistant, Ashley, telling him that the unspecified event is now a no-go.

Like any auteur, Chopra wants to make a revealing film. Which means he is in a difficult position. A lifetime spent in front of cameras—a lifetime of creating personas and reinforcing them, of burnishing his own mythology, just as Michael Jackson once did—makes it hard for Kobe to let down his guard, even when he tries. At one point I ask Bryant why he has yet to sign on for a ghost-written autobiography. He says he’s thought about it. That he’s read Andre Agassi’s book and admires it. But if he did it, Bryant says, he’d want to actually write the book himself. Even so, he says, “I’m not ready yet. Writing carries such a level of transparency. I think if you’re going to write a book, you have to be ready to be completely transparent about everything that’s taken place. And I’m not at that place yet.”