MOVIES: The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008)

Finally overcoming his tendency to indulge in excessive artsy-fartsiness, Aronofsky makes his best movie yet by simply telling a simple story.

The story is that of Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke), who was one of the best professional wrestlers 20 years ago. Today, he clings to his wrestling career, fighting second-rate opponents on third-rate bills in fourth-rate towns. And that career is all he has to cling to; he's estranged from his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and the closest thing he has to a romantic relationship is the occasional bit of mild flirtation with local stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei).

There's really only one big plot point in The Wrestler -- Randy has a heart attack -- and for the rest of the movie, we watch as Randy tries to cope with the ways in which that changes his life. How does a middle-aged man deal with life when the only career he's ever known, the only thing he's ever been good at, is taken away from him?

Rourke is almost always on screen in this movie, and all the good things you've heard about his perfromance are true. It's a performance utterly lacking in vanity; Rourke's own battered face and body -- he spent several years as a boxer during his exile from Hollywood -- are constantly on display.

The rest of the movie is not up to Rourke's level. Tomei does a solid job, creating a full character from the leftover heart-of-gold scraps that Aronofsky has given her, but the movie is none too subtle in pounding home the parallels between the aging Randy and the aging Cassidy (Tomei is still a lovely woman, but as strippers go, she is a bit long in the tooth), or the notion that her strip club is the equivalent of his wrestling ring. The Stephanie storyline is even worse, with lots of wounded "you were never there for me" nonsense, and the standard formulas about Randy buying wildly inappropriate gifts and so on.

And if you're sensitive about movie violence, you should be warned that the wrestling scenes here are absolutely brutal; I found them extraordinarily hard to sit through. Yes, it's important to show us just how Randy has become so battered and damaged, but the point could have been made in half the time with scenes far less intense; these scenes are less about telling the audience something it needs to know than they are about brutalizing the audience, and they are enough to keep me from simply recommending The Wrestler. Yes, Rourke's performance is superb, but I'm not sure any performance is good enough to make it worth being assaulted by unnecessary violence for the first half-hour of the movie.