Violence, sex and failure are the great themes in American film and literature, and the director Darren Aronofsky’s movie The Wrestler flirts with all three.

Aronofsky, who became the indie boy wonder with his 1998 debut feature, Pi, has here created a kind of indie Rocky. It’s the sort of sports film that will appeal to people too sophisticated for the corn and triumphalism of the Rocky series. Those films were an unabashed celebration of the underdog as winner: this is an unabashed celebration of the old dog as loser.

Stallone played a boxer called Rocky. Here, Mickey Rourke plays a wrestler called Randy. (They are both lovable lugs, low on brains and big on heart.) Back in the 1980s, Randy “The Ram” Robinson had been a star. His back story is told in the film’s opening credits — the camera pans across a wall of Randy fight posters, flyers, press clippings and photographs. It’s an ode to one man’s glory-filled past. But the film then cuts straight to the present.

Most sport-based films start with the contender’s dream of success, but The Wrestler begins — and ends — with his failure. Our first sight of Randy’s battered body outside the ring — his hearing aid; the puffy, aged face; the dirty mane of blond hair — tells us this guy ain’t going nowhere but down. He still wrestles, but the crowds are in decline. Outside the ring, reality is cold and cruel. He can’t afford the rent on his trailer (he has a part-time job), he has no wife, no girlfriend; and his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) hates him. Only Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), an ageing stripper, will listen to him talk, for a price.

Still, when a promoter suggests a rematch with one of his famous foes from 20 years earlier, the Ayatollah, Randy agrees, saying: “Who knows, it may be my ticket back to the top.” But the line isn’t said sarcastically, so it doesn’t really work. After all, Randy may be a loser, but he’s not deluded. Anyway, his life changes when, during a match, he has a heart attack and is advised by the doctor not to keep wrestling.

Now he must deal with the toughest opponent he’s ever faced, himself. Randy decides to try to create a life outside the ring: he gets in touch with his daughter, he gets a job working at a deli counter in a supermarket and tries to make an honest woman out of Cassidy. Of course, he screws everything up and, despite his doctor’s warning, agrees to take on the Ayatollah one more time. You have to admit that this setup — will he or won’t he die of a heart attack? — is the stuff of pure corn.

Robert D Siegel’s screenplay never really digs deep into Randy. Has he ruined his life because he preferred the glory of the ring to the responsibilities of real life? Or was he just a selfish screw-up, as his daughter suggests? What the film lacks in psychological depth it makes up for in sheer physicality. It’s full of battered and ageing flesh: Randy’s bruised chest, his crumpled face. Like Rocky, he asserts his masculine strength through physical suffering. He will deliberately cut himself to make his show look more authentic. But the film alludes more to Christ on the cross than to Rocky in the ring. (Randy has a Jesus tattoo.) At one point, Cassidy suggests he should see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. See it? The guy’s living it! At one point, Randy says to his daughter: “I’m an old broken-down piece of meat, and I deserve to be alone.”

Cassidy is performing meat, too; mutton undressing to pass for lamb. They are people who want out, but have nowhere to go. The passage of time has left Randy and Cassidy washed up on the shores of the present; and, without a future, they can only look to the past. In one of the best scenes in the film, they are in a bar talking about how great the 1980s were, with their great heavy-metal anthems — “Before that pussy Kurt Cobain came along and ruined everything,” says Randy.

As a film about wrestling, we are shown what we suspect: that it’s all a piece of ritualistic theatre, in which the good and the bad ham it up. There may be a bloody battle in the ring, but once outside it’s all handshakes and hugs; these wrestlers are a brotherhood of the battered. But what is the film really saying about a modern America where sex and violence are leisure spectacles? The film alludes to big themes — Jesus Christ and the war in Iraq — but I’m not sure it actually has anything to say.

Still, there is no denying the brute authenticity of Rourke’s performance. It’s one of those turns that hides the fact that you’re not watching a great movie. But when all the raves for this comeback have quietened down, will the character of Randy “The Ram” Robinson live on in the way Rocky does in popular culture? I doubt it.

15, 109 mins

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