Take a Ringside Seat for Rourke's Galvanizing Comeback

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2008)

It's hard to imagine any actor but the thoroughly embattled Mickey Rourke in the title role of this unremittingly bleak 2008 character study of a pro wrestling star well past his prime and trying to figure out if he can have a life outside the ring. Unlike the heavily stylized work for which he is known ("Pi", "Requiem for a Dream"), director Darren Aronofsky takes a refreshingly straightforward approach here, and Roarke responds with a galvanizing performance that appears to blur the line between reality and fiction. A talented actor ("Sin City") with a tattered career of early highs and all-too-many lows, much of them his own doing, he has such a firm grasp on his character's fatal flaws one can't help wondering how much art is imitating life. Regardless, the symbiotic result makes for an often powerful film-watching experience.
Rourke plays blond-maned Randy "The Ram" Robinson whose professional glory peaked back in the 1980's. Two decades later, he finds his career relegated to small-time matches on the independent circuit in venues attended by only the most fanatical of his diminishing fan base. Living in a trailer he can barely afford, Randy lives on the edge of life, using a pharmacy of meds to hold his broken body together and going to a strip club where he finds himself drawn to a veteran lap dancer named Cassidy. Even in such desperate straits, he proves to be a decent man wracked with not only physical pain but a foreboding sense of his own mortality once he is hospitalized after a grueling match. The story focuses on his fumbling attempts to come to terms with what he wants from what's left of his life.
That includes reconciling with his long-estranged daughter Stephanie who has grown bitter over years of being ignored, forming a lasting relationship with Cassidy beyond the next sixty dollars, and even quitting the ring entirely by working the deli counter at a local grocery store. However, the draw of a twentieth anniversary rematch with another iconic wrestler, the Ayatollah, pulls hard at him with the dream of recapturing his former glory. The storyline sounds predictable, and it is if you just take into account Robert Siegel's bare-bones screenplay, but it falls on Rourke's deeply felt work to thwart the clichés. Only allowed to show the character in terms of his succession of failures, the actor brings aching heart and surprising sensitivity to a role that could have easily been mired in stereotype. His confessional at the deserted amusement park is heartbreaking.
At the same time, with his physique made to look ravaged by steroids and ringside abuse, he is completely convincing in the ring as he orchestrates the elaborate moves to give his fans their money's worth. As the self-protective Cassidy, Marisa Tomei ("Before the Devil Knows You're Dead") again proves what a fine, underrated character actress she can be as her character uneasily keeps Randy at arm's length when his need for intimacy threatens her insulated world. Evan Rachel Wood ("Across the Universe") has less to do as Stephanie, but she punctuates her scenes with both visceral anger and poignant wariness. The film has an almost documentary feel about it thanks to Aronofsky's no-frills direction and Maryse Alberti's washed-out cinematography, but the approach is fitting given the gritty subject.