Rating: 3.5 stars

Professional boxing has inspired many great movies. Pro wrestling? Not so much. Until now.
As The Wrestler opens to the strains of blaring ’80s heavy metal, we get a brief overview of the career of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke). He was a pumped up pretty boy with flowing bleached blond locks, a signature move (the “Ram Slam,” where he balanced himself on the ropes and body slammed his opponent), an arch rival named The Ayatollah (remember, this was the ’80s), and legions of rabid fans.
Then, the music stops, and dryly across the screen it flashes, “20 Years Later.”
Today, Randy the Ram is a Rocky-style loser, a lovable middle-aged galoot working the semi-pro circuit, having traded in Madison Square Garden for half-empty high school gymnasiums. He’s living in a trailer park and he works at a grocery store during the week, but he lives for those weekend wrestling bouts. He still clings in vain to his Randy the Ram action figure, his Randy the Ram Nintendo game (he plays with a dutiful neighborhood boy who would much rather be playing a combat simulation game), and his Randy the Ram videos (no DVDs, of course.) He’s pumped up on human growth hormones and has a bum ticker. He’s clearly too old for this gig. Any resemblance to Mickey Rourke's career as an actor is strictly intentional.
The enormously talented director Darren Aronofsky goes deep into this semi-pro wrestling culture—the scenes at the bouts manage to be hilarious, disturbing, and surprisingly touching. Wrestling may well be fake but, as Aronofsky shows, the pain is quite real. These guys don’t have expensive props to work with, so they use things like stapler guns, barbed wire, and razors hidden under wrist bands. (To maximize the gore.) They all know their assigned roles: the bad guys do highly choreographed low blows to a chorus of lusty boos from the audience; the good guys always lose at first and then triumphantly come back to win. They beat the stuffing out of each other and then all go out for beers afterwards. It’s a brotherhood of barbarians.
Randy likes to hang out in a strip club, where he has a crush on an aging dancer named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). Their careers are meant to parallel each other. Cassidy may still be hot (the 44-year-old Tomei has no compunctions about dancing nude in the film—and with that body, who can blame her?) but the customers want the younger models. Not Ram, of course, he’s loyal to the bitter end.
Rourke injects Randy with a gruff warmth and a shambling sadness that he wears like a heavy coat. Rourke does little things, like pop in Ram’s hearing aid or rock out to an old metal song, with an effortless familiarity. The real miracle of Rourke’s performance is this: Moments in, we forget about all the meta similarities between Rourke and Ram and we simply become engrossed in his story. Now that’s acting.

To read the full review, check out the February issue of Baltimore.