My favorite scene in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler features Mickey Rourke as washed-up wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, complete with hearing aid and chest pains, dancing to Ratt’s 1984 hair metal song “Round and Round” in a dive bar. Rourke tells a stripper, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), how great the ’80s were, snatches a kiss, and turns wistful. “And then that pussy Cobain came along and ruined everything,” he says.
Rourke, who quit acting for boxing three years before Cobain shot himself, has had a checkered career ever since. But his ability to evoke the exuberance of the ’80s with the fragility of a man personifying the hung-over downsides of that era undoubtedly accounts for the widespread acclaim he’s been receiving for this role. Robinson’s the antithesis of self-involved grunge singers, and it would have been easy for a lesser actor to ham his way through the part—but instead, Rourke plays him as a man too aware of the cost of having lived to entertain.
Thankfully, the script doesn’t take easy options, either. Where characters could reconcile, they often don’t; Tomei’s stripper could become a love interest for Robinson, but she makes it clear that she doesn’t sleep with the customers; Robinson’s relationship with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) is awkward rather than sentimental. Even the scenes where Robinson’s serving meat at a deli counter are bleakly comic.
Some have criticized the ending of The Wrestler, but one can hardly see Robinson going out like Cobain, and why the fuck should he? I smell a cult brewing—like Cobain’s, even, but on steroids.