Annihilation and resurrection are the twin axes upon which The Wrestler turns, the former found in the bruised-and-battered pro wrestler at its center, and the latter in that role's triumphant revitalization of Mickey Rourke's long-tarnished career. Rourke is Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a golden-maned '80s hero of the squared circle who, 20 years removed from his halcyon days battling the evil Ayatollah in Madison Square Garden, has now gone to seed, struggling to earn enough cash on the local wrestling circuit to keep the manager of a trailer park from locking him out of mobile house and home. He's an aged Rocky Balboa by way of Hulk Hogan, too old to grapple and also to change, and Darren Aronofsky's follow-up to The Fountain proves, on a purely narrative level, something of a conventional you-can't-teach-an-old-dog-new-tricks saga, charting Randy's life on the margins with a raft of conventions and clichés common to that sports subgenre in which an ex-titan gives it one last go round. Yet if familiarity abounds, Aronofsky's attention to detail, his potent evocation of milieu and character, nonetheless invigorates his straightforward material in a manner almost as quietly devastating as Rourke's broken-down soulfulness—a raw mishmash of regret, guilt, shame and pride—as a gladiator determined to stay true, damn the consequences, to his brutal, injurious personal code.  Nick Schager