The Wrestler is another example of a trailer far better than the movie. This Mickey Rourke comeback vehicle has a 98% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Count me in the resistance, the 2%: this movie is a bendy soap opera as unsubtle as Crash. Yeah, I said it: pro wrestling is as queer as a Broadway musical. There’s the tanning, the waxing, the highlighting, the tights. It’s scripted, it’s theater; a black guy plays an Iranian heel, and the audience participates in the ritual, booing him like the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The good parts of The Wrestler feel like the human sleaze of Oye Lucky and Chandni Bar, documenting the blue collar lives of wrestlers and strippers who turn tricks for a living. Darren Aronofsky’s pal Ajay Naidu plays a medic who patches up Mickey Rourke after a fight. Rourke won his Golden Globe for the same reason why people appreciate wrestlers — their physical investment and stunt-like body mods. After a bout with a staple-gun shtick, his lat-enhanced back looms in frame like some beastly, ridged back pockmarked with flesh wounds. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s appreciation for Rourke is as American as the chubby, be-flanneled wrestling fans themselves.

But the movie is little more than a high-class soap opera. Randy the Ram is not just alluded to as a Christ figure, his stripper girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) spells it out with a quote from the Bible. The parallel between the wrestler and the stripper is not just hinted at, Aronofsky cuts directly from Rourke shaving his pits to Tomei getting ready for her turn on the stripper pole. Randy passing through a portal into his day job doesn’t just square his shoulders like a wrestler, he hears the crowd roar his name in his head. His boss isn’t just discomfiting, he’s an Office-style jerk who watches p0rn in his office and delivers lines with Kevin Spacey-level snark.

The hard-living wrestler into cocaine parties and one-night stands is played like a saint who barely even curses. The stripper is a mom with a heart of gold. Evan Rachel Wood is egregious in her soap opera sensibility; you never believe her performance for a second. The screenwriter makes Rourke’s rubbery mug blubber lines like, ‘Now I’m just a broken-down piece of meat’ and ‘I just don’t want you to hate me,’ and we’re expected to lap it up as some kind of reconciliation. The dramatic climax, when the wrestler goes on a rampage and quits his day job, is elaborately telegraphed in advance. The final scene is a battle-of-the-bands, a Rocky-style wrestling match against a guy in chuddies decorated with the Iranian flag: Ivan Drageh. It all feels very Lokhandwala serial.

You suspect in the end that this movie is Aronofsky’s idea of an elaborate joke. Fine, he’s saying, you wouldn’t accept a movie as unconventional as The Fountain, so I’m going to give you pap. I’m going to do it like a kabuki show, like the film version of a badly scripted wrestling match, and watch it win awards. But a director can only pull a stunt after establishing a track record, and at this point Aronofsky’s is painfully thin.

The movie is also tremendously depressing, expending precious screen time on back-office cinder-block walls, downbeat Jersey stores and the accoutrements of aging. Rourke turns his hearing aid into a fetish and seems miked for labored breathing. The film is often grainy and bleached with the same queasy green palette of Primer. Much of the movie is filmed behind Rourke’s back like the third-person view in a first-person shooter. Here’s Randy filling his drugstore prescription. Here’s Randy injecting ‘roids in his droopy, clippered buttock. You go to a movie to see the good stuff, not the B-side. There’s enough overhead in real life.

It’s touching how a small rollaboard trails the wrestler, stuffed with spray-tan and sequins like the gear of a salsera. Wearing the pelt of a small animal, Rourke enters the arena like a 300 partisan going off to war. Marisa Tomei’s hardbod is on full display. And Aronofsky treats race well. Most Hollywood is as carefully bleached as Friends. In The Wrestler, the store owner is desi, the doctor Iranian-American, the hairdresser Asian. Randy the Ram is actually n^th-gen Polish, full name Robin Ramzinsky.

What a concept: writing it like real life.

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