It’s about five minutes into Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler before we see Mickey Rourke’s face. He’s been on screen the whole time, but seen either in long shot, turned away from the viewer, or else shown from behind, the camera following him as he trudges through his trailer park home. And when it’s finally revealed, filling the whole screen in profile, it’s a ruined thing, deformed by years of plastic surgery, beatings and steroids.

But it’s also the emblem of this sad and unexpectedly beautiful film - an ode to C-list celebrity, and the difficulty of making a life in the shadows, once the bright lights have faded. Here he plays a wrestler, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, some 20 years past his prime. Scarred from a thousand falls, fuelled by a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, he’s slipped from the main events to the minor leagues: local matches in small-town halls, a long way from the bloodless, choreographed mayhem of the WWE.

When he’s felled by a heart attack, minutes after a particularly demanding bout, he takes stock and attempts to change his life. He finds a job at the deli counter in a supermarket, attempts to romance a stripper (Marisa Tomei, superb here), and most importantly, tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood); their day together, on an abandoned fun pier, is the film’s most heartbreakingly lovely sequence.

Coming as it does after the grungy hyper-realism of Requiem for a Dream, and the utopian sci-fi of The Fountain, The Wrestler seems a strange choice of project for Aronofsky. For the first time, he’s working entirely from another writer’s script (Robert D. Siegel, better known as a comedy writer), and while the narrative is familiar from countless fight flicks, the script shows flashes of real wit - especially when Rourke and Tomei connect over a shared love of Eighties hard rock, from the days “before that pussy Cobain ruined everything”.

Yet it’s never condescending. Rather, it’s tender, finely detailed and moving - aided in no small part by Aronofsky’s feeling for the disorder of ordinary lives, and his elegant visual sense. (A final, apotheosising long shot, of The Ram standing on the ropes, about to deliver his coup de grace, is breathtaking.)

Addressing the crowd before his last bout, it’s hard to not hear Rourke speaking through his character. “I’m slower now,” he says. “I don’t hear so good. And I ain’t as pretty as I used to be.” It’s true: he’s almost unrecognisable as the handsome, mysterious Motorcycle Boy from Rumble Fish. But here, his tribulations are, finally, triumphantly vindicated. Like The Ram, he’s taken a lifetime of hits to reach this moment, and he’s won. He owns this film.

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