ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

TWENTY years ago Mickey Rourke was considered one of the biggest movie stars of his generation. So much has changed since then. In the 1990s, Rourke seemed to press the self-destruct button on his career when he turned his back on Hollywood to pursue the life of a professional boxer.

Battered, bruised, older and wiser, he finally makes the screen comeback of his dreams in The Wrestler, a gritty, old-fashioned character study in which Rourke’s outstanding performance seems set to win him an Oscar nomination.

Rourke is perfectly cast as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a professional wrestler whose glory days are all in the past. A superstar in the 1980s, he maintains a faltering grip on his fame by wrestling at the weekend and working in a supermarket to pay the bills.

Rourke invests him with a measure of dignity, good-humour and agreeable humanity. The Ram is not an embittered relic of a bygone age but a man who has come to accept that he only feels alive when he is performing for an adoring if dwindling public.

Naturally there have been personal sacrifices along the way, and during the course of the film, The Ram is faced with a health scare, struggles to re-establish a meaningful relationship with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and tries to kindle a romance with ageing lap dancer Cassidy (Marisa Tomei).

The Wrestler has echoes of the Rocky series and the John Huston classic Fat City (1972), and doesn’t quite justify the extravagant praised that has been heaped upon it, but Rourke is extremely touching and deserves all the magazine features and glowing reviews that have come his way. It’s good to have him back.

Nationwide release

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Mark Margolis, Todd Barry, Wass Stevens
Screenwriter: Robert D.Siegel
Certificate: 15
Running time: 109 mins
Country: USA
Year: 2008