What I can easily do is go on forever about the brilliance of the first 30 minutes of The Wrestler. I can go on about how Mickey Rourke convincingly buries his real being in the beat-up bulk of artificial muscles and tanned flesh called Randy "the Ram" Robinson. All that remains of Rourke in this beast are his eyes; the way they twinkled in his string of '80s hits can be glimpsed during the lighter, more playful moments of the movie. I can also go on and on about how the director, Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), successfully transferred the Dardenne brothers' celebrated brand of European realism to the bleak surfaces and spaces of what critic J. Hoberman called Nowhere, New Jersey: 99¢ stores, parking lots, trailer parks, strip joints, dive bars, neglected community centers, and so on. In the way that the Dardenne brothers force us to see their characters directly, we are forced to look at the Ram directly. We are in his world and nowhere else.

I can also go on and on and on about the core humanity of several scenes—when the wrestler is playing video games with a boy; when the wrestler is in a locker room with other wrestlers; when the wrestler is praising the beauty of an aging stripper (Marisa Tomei); when the wrestler, with permanently broken fingers, is placing a delicate pair of reading glasses on a permanently broken nose. In these moments, the particular connects with the universal, with the lasting truths of friendship, dignity, and kindness. These connections (between fallen and the eternal) constitute the film's highest achievement. Why? Because nothing in the world could be easier than the job of generating cheap laughs about this fallen world, this afterworld (or even underworld), this world of professional wrestling. The film has its laughter, but not at a low price. What we see instead is that rare kind of human warmth that is usually only found in works of high art.

Indeed, Hoberman was quick (if not the first) to point out a link between The Wrestler and Roland Barthes's famous essay "The World of Wrestling." We find in the first 30 minutes of the movie the same honesty with which Barthes examined and explained the structures and themes of professional wrestling in his time (the mid-1950s). Here where everything seems so ridiculous or mindless—the heroic or villainous costumes, the folding chairs smashed on the back, the crashing on tables, the leaping from ropes, the falling backward on a prone opponent, the chanting fans ("You! Sick! Fuck! You! Sick! Fuck!")—even here there is something deeply human and honest.

But all of these things I could go on about get the boot when the movie's plot kicks in. This happens right after a horrific fight with a wrestler who staples money to his flesh (I could go on and on just about that alone). Bloody, bruised, and wheezing, the Ram collapses and goes to the hospital. Once he recovers, the plot starts to do its predictable work: the generation of emotional tension. And what's the closest place to go for some tension? The family. All families are rich sources for Oscar-winning emotional tension because there is no such thing as a family that is not broken. A family is packed to breaking with painful memories, resentments, guilt, sexual regrets. The Ram has a daughter. The daughter hates the Ram because he neglected her. She never wants to talk to him again. Get this: She was so damaged by his bad parenting that now she is a lesbian. Furthermore, her lover is the only type of woman that could appreciate the depth of her pain: a black woman, a woman who unites in her blackness the anger of Alice Walker and the sensitivity of Oprah Winfrey. Women are the niggers of the universe.

The Ram has no one else in the world but his daughter. And now that his health is not so good, it's time for him to make peace with her, to show her that he really cares about her and that he will never abandon her again. Tension, tension, and even more tension.

How shall we end this review? I say, with a wrestling metaphor—and you say, how appropriate. Like a thick and ugly wrestler ("the Bastard"), the plot puts a chokehold on the first and best 30 minutes of the film ("the Ram"), and tries to squeeze the life out of it. But somehow the first 30 minutes breaks free, climbs the ropes, rises, and prepares to fall on the prone plot: The best part of the movie wins the contest. But The Wrestler came that close to defeat. That close!