Out of Frame: The Wrestler

The first shot of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler is from behind, and throughout the opening, director Darren Aronofsky refuses to show his star from the front. He continues this tease, barely showing the edges of the actor's battered face before finally allowing us the chance to see it in all its wounded glory. Rourke doesn't need makeup to look this permanently damaged these days, and some of the emotional scars in his performance probably run painfully close to reality as well.

His character, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is a pro wrestler who was once considered one of the best performers in the business. But years of personal difficulties, drug use, and generally being a fuck-up have reduced him to trading on his reputation in relative obscurity. Here I'm still talking about Randy, but could just as easily be talking about Rourke himself. And Randy needs a second chance to shine just as surely as Rourke does. In The Wrestler, he gets it: an opportunity to stage a rematch of one of the most celebrated bouts of his career for buckets of cash. For a guy who just got locked out of his run-down trailer for being behind on the rent, it's the right opportunity, but at the wrong time. Randy has health problems that should have him looking for another line of work in a hurry.

But when you've wrecked your body with steroids and HGH while hitting guys with chairs and pile-driving their heads into the floor for your whole life, what exactly is your next career move? Aronofsky's film looks with an unflinching eye at the plight of people who make their living off their bodies, and what they do next, once there's nothing left to shake out of that moneymaker. For Randy, it's the wrestling ring that has paid the bills; for his friend Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), it's the stripper's pole. Her work exacts a physical toll over the years just as surely as his, and her clients, even more than his, are always clamoring for a younger model. Leering fratboys don't really want a lapdance from a woman old enough to be their mother.

Aronofsky strips both of these entertainments of any semblance of glamor or glitter in a dizzying stylistic about-face from the gloss and special-effects sheen of his last outing, The Fountain. The wrestling, in particular, is shown in gory and graphic detail. This isn't the WWE; these aren't televised matches in huge arenas. They're still staged, but that doesn't mean that the blood isn't real. Things that look painful often are. These are guys who slip razor blades into their taped-up wrists to cut their own foreheads at opportune moments, who carefully choreograph how they're going to throw each other through plate glass. Calling wrestling "fake" is accurate to a point, but that doesn't make the injuries any less real. Rourke's matches in the movie aren't with actors and stuntmen; they're with real wrestlers, who give the movie a feeling of reality that prompted "Rowdy" Roddy Piper to burst into tears and embrace Aronofsky at a preview screening. It's just that accurate, and just that heartbreaking.

Everything wrestling has given Randy, it's taken away. His daughter, played with an impressive glower by Evan Rachel Wood, is estranged, just as removed from his reach as Cassidy — who tries hard to see Randy more as client than friend. Randy is a guy who everyone knows and everyone loves, but he's overwhelmed by a crushing loneliness that grabs your heart in a headlock and squeezes until it bursts. His career and his youth are slipping away, his daughter is lost to him, even his music was ruined when metal fell out of favor because of "that pussy Cobain."

Rourke, through all of this, is an amazing presence. Through that now-lumpy face, the pounds of muscle, his eyes and his body still have the mind-blowing skill that had him pegged as the next Brando, the next DeNiro, the next Dean back when his career started, before his own drug- and fuck-up–induced fall. The Wrestler is, make no mistake, high melodrama. He gives a speech at the start of his grand rematch that Rocky Balboa himself might think a little grandiose. He delivers lines to his daughter like, "I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone, I just don't want you to hate me." In different hands, the same script (by former Onion Editor-in-Chief Robert D. Siegel) could have been a maudlin mess. But Aronofsky's bare-bones production, treading close to documentary realism with grainy 16mm and wobbly (but never self-indulgent) hand-held shooting, and Rourke's soul-baring performance, make it into something else entirely: a naturalistic and honest tear-jerker, and one of the finest films of the year.

The Wrestler opens Christmas Day at Georgetown and Bethesda Row.