Surely Mickey Rourke must lift the Oscar. His performance as a broken-down wrestler who can’t let go of his glorious past is the most honest thing he’s done. There are much better films, but this is an exceptional piece of acting, a triumph of brute charisma over a schematic plot. There’s a touch of Rocky about Rourke.

In the early 1980s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson was primetime beef on channel TV. Today he’s a $3 blast of slapstick nostalgia. He tops the bill in church halls and school gyms in the armpits of New Jersey. The Ram seems impervious to just how ridiculous he looks as he pins the Ayatollah to the canvas with a Boston Crab. Thirty years of steroid abuse have done strange things to Randy’s body. Indeed the first question that springs to mind when Rourke strips for action is: “Who on earth grafted on your head?”

The 52-year-old’s ancient face is cratered by sunbed crinkles. His eerie, bulging, 22-year-old torso is tucked into a spangly pair of luminous tights. The Viking hairdo is 3ft of badly peroxided tangles. None of Randy’s joints are in working order. There’s a vertiginous scene where he chews a razor blade into small bits and hides them under his bandages seconds before a major fight. To all intents and purposes it looks as if the old warrior is preparing to slice up his young opponent in public. But Randy wants to bleed harder than anyone else.

Darren Aronofsky’s first intelligible film in ten years bristles with these gripping details. Every tense scene on a Saturday night is coated in melancholy and sweat. The camaraderie between the fighters is painted beautifully. These weekly chalk-and-cheese friends happily curry the delusion that they are still at the top of their game, failing to grasp that nobody between the ages of 6 and senile dementia actually takes their sport remotely seriously. In retaliation, they clobber and batter each other in the ring with almost pornographic fury.

Rourke luxuriates in the blood and pain. I doubt there’s an actor in the world who enjoys pounding himself senseless quite as much. Randy roars like a medieval berserker. He head-bangs his way through the rock’n’ roll routines. There is something unspeakably pathetic about the way he slips on his glasses and fixes his hearing aid at the end of the evening.

His ghastly tragedy is that he can’t seem to function outside the ring, and no one cares. His estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) will never forgive him for being a terminally absent father. His favourite stripper in Cheekie’s (the incredibly flexible Marisa Tomei) is loath to kiss a man twice her age and half her IQ.

On another level it’s almost impossible to separate Rourke’s own personal luggage from the rotten choices his character makes. That is the film’s morbid appeal.

The weakness of Aronofsky’s film is that these various sentimental crises are framed with as much subtlety as Randy’s wildly overdue heart attack. The film lurches into a predictable panic about dying alone. The Wrestler is far more eloquent when it gives up trying to impress. In the most moving scene barely anything happens at all. Crippled and forgotten wrestlers sit silently behind desks in an otherwise empty hall, hoping that someone might turn up and give them a buck for an ancient VHS of their greatest hits. That one scene nails the tragedy.

15, 109mins

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