‘The Iron Claw’ and the Return of the Sports Weeper

‘The Iron Claw,’ an effective and moving biopic tragedy set in the world of 1980s professional wrestling, marks the return of a movie genre that’s been in remission in recent years: the sports weeper. The inverse of the “people overcoming odds to win the big game” trope that dominates sports filmmaking, the sports weeper sets up good men, sweaty men, men in platonic love with one another, who find themselves grieving death instead of celebrating a championship.

The baseline sports weeper is Pride of the Yankees, about the death of Lou Gehrig, but the genre really found its legs in the 1970s with the football drama Brian’s Song and the baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly. Then there is the standard-bearer of the genre: The Champ, the original 1930s Wallace Beery version, and the absolutely heartbreaking Jon Voight/Ricky Schroeder 1970s remake. A more recent iteration is Million Dollar Baby, the Clint Eastwood boxing picture that won the Academy Award. In the first three, disease strikes, robbing friends, family, and fans of their beloved athletes. In the boxing pictures, the sport itself is the culprit that kills the athlete. The Iron Claw ups that ante: people who wrestle may love it, and fans may bray for blood real and imagined, but the sport itself is a constant dance with pain and death.

THE IRON CLAW ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Sean Durkin
Written by: Sean Durkin
Starring: Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Holt McCallany, Maura Tierney, Lily James
Running time: 132 mins

Zac Efron, beefed beyond imagination and sporting a ridiculous Prince Valiant haircut, plays Kevin von Erich, a sweet-natured Denton, Texas boy who becomes an oiled death machine when he steps into the ring. He is the “second oldest” son of a large wrestling family, the oldest having died in a terrible accident at age five. The father, Fritz von Erich, played by the menacing, screen-chewing Holt McCallany, is a former wrestler and college football player, bitter about never having won the big titles he felt he deserved. He has passed this legacy of seeking a champion’s belt onto his jacked-up sons, who, like all good Texas boys, obey their father but really seem to just want to horse around together and tube on the river with some beers.

The other brothers are David, a mouthy, fun-loving blond; Mike, who would rather play in a garage band than get into the ring; and Kerry, who is in training to be a Olympic discus thrower. When Jimmy Carter announces the 1980 Olympics boycott, Kerry comes home, the von Erich brothers take to the ring together, and the “family curse” begins to come into focus.

The Iron Claw has Jeremy Allen White in its back pocket. White plays Kerry with the same doe-eyed but totally jacked intensity he brings to the kitchen in The Bear. It’s White’s first major screen role, and he dominates, even though he doesn’t appear until at least a half hour into the runtime. Efron is also very moving, if somewhat physically unrecognizable, McCallany makes for an excellent villain, and Maura Tierney plays her role as a grieving mother whose Christianity can’t save her boys effectively and with grace. Lily James also shows up as Efron’s wife Pam, and she is, for a change, very naturalistic and not annoying.

The Iron Claw hammers home, very clearly, that the world of professional wrestling is brutal and stupid, and also that the people who wrestle for a living love it and take it very seriously. This is not a satire. It gets inside the mind and gym of the von Erich family, and when the boys start to succumb to the brutality of the ring, shattering a beautiful brotherhood, the audience feels it viscerally. Kevin von Erich’s pain is all our pain.

The Iron Claw is by turns, quite funny and deeply sad, thrilling and exploitative. It takes place in a wrestling era, just before our own, before the era of Vince McMahon, Hulk Hogan, and The Rock, where there was some money in wrestling, but not big money. There’s some grainy basic-cable cheese to the actual wrestling sequences that give The Iron Claw a feeling of versimilitude. Director Sean Durkin isn’t going to win any avant-garde style points, but his screenplay is excellent, and there is not one false note in any of the performances. Beyond the near-parodic lunkhead melodrama, he makes important and deeply unironic points about the toxic burden of parental expectations on children, and about the need to break the cycle of family trauma.

The movie leaves out certain important aspects of the real Von Erich story, like a couple of wives, Kerry’s indictment in Dallas County on cocaine possession charges, and, most significantly, a fifth brother, Chris, who suffered his own tragedy. So it’s not the full story, but it tells enough. Any more sadness and the audience itself might not walk out of this picture alive. Most importantly, The Iron Claw teaches us a new lesson that is also old: That it’s OK to cry over sports, and not just because your fantasy team had a bad week.