A lot of people will tell you that professional wrestling is not really a sport, and for the most part they're right. It often operates closer to a piece of theater than an actual competition. But The Wrestler, which comes out in December, proves that the hopes and dreams of a professional wrestler aren't really that different than those of a minor league pitcher or a high school quarterback—or from anyone else for that matter.
The film tells the story of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a wrestler forced to retire and take a job at a deli after a debilitating heart attack. In form, it's basically a reiteration of the classic sports movie arc: guy gets knocked down, guy pulls himself back up, guy gets one more shot to make things right. Yet there is something instantly more visceral about The Wrestler (you get that sense from just the trailer). That the movie puts original tweaks on the normal sports archetypes and cliches helps, but, really, it's just that Mickey Rourke is that real, sometimes dangerously so.
The films Mickey is usually in involve the gritty underbelly of our culture—he was in Body Heat, Man On Fire, and Sin City, and offered roles in The Outsiders and Pulp Fiction. He's made a career playing outcasts and characters who are damaged beyond repair. But in "The Wrestler," he plays the rare character who is both seriously flawed, yet capable of redemption.
Mickey was a boxer himself in the '90s (coached by Hells Angel trainer Chuck Zito) and he understands what it means to make great sacrifices (often physical ones) in exchange for very small praise. Maybe it's that background that makes his character so believable. Or maybe he's just a great actor. Either way the result is a movie that is already being heralded as a "once in a blue moon" caliber drama. In the end it's ultimately a great sports movie too. A movie about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, about being a total hardass in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and about finding redemption in strange places.
Springsteen even wrote a song, "The Wrestler," especially for the movie. You can check out the song and the full trailer here.