From the first scenes of The Wrestler, in which Maryse Alberti’s handheld camera follows Mickey Rourke from behind as his Randy “The Ram” Robinson goes through the closing motions of what we’re to understand is a typically trying day, director Darren Aronofsky announces that he’s picked up a new set of aesthetic references since his last film, the non-linear effects extravaganza The Fountain. It’s apparently impossible for contemporary directors to adopt the technique described aboce without someone suggesting that they ripped it from a film by the Dardennes brothers, but its use in The Wrestler feels very different from its use in, say, L’Enfant: it doesn’t produce the same sense of a tension that could break if the camera ever allowed its subject to get too far away. In fact, several times, the camera just stops while Rourke keeps moving, allowing us to appreciate the full physicality of the actor’s performance long before we ever see his face.

There must be a cerebral component to the way Rourke approached becoming the aging wrestler at the center of this film, because otherwise I doubt he’d have been able to so deftly navigate the character’s expansive emotional arc while still nailing all the jokes. But this performance goes way beyond the brain, or the precision with which Rourke transformed his appearance, or even the naturalism with which he performs the wrestling choreography. This is a performance that seems to start and end in the cardiovascular system, making everything Rourke actually does seem effortless. As if he’s just breathing it.

A wrestling superstar in the 80s (famous enough, at his peak, to have his own 8-bit representation jumping off the ropes in a Nintendo game), 20 years later Randy is barely holding it together, sleeping in a van when his trailer is padlocked for failure to pay rent, unloading boxes at a supermarket to make the cash from small-time meets stretch to cover his bleach, tanning and human growth hormone habits. Randy remains fiercely committed to the sport, even though his body’s not what it used to be, and even though the sport –– at least on a mainstream, big-money level –– no longer has much interest in him. With the 20th anniversary coming up of Randy’s biggest fight (a face-off with an Iranian flag-waving wrestler by the name of The Ayatollah), Randy’s producer approaches him with “two words: Re. Match.” This gives Randy something to work on other than the hot-and-cold affections of aging stripper Pam (Marisa Tomei), but when a particularly intense fight results in serious injury, Randy has to turn off autopilot and reevaluate his options. That this all manages more often than not to avoid sports film fall-rise cliches and veer into unexpected directions whilst exploring a wide range of feeling is a minor miracle. It’s a cliche to say that Rourke’s performance is “fearless” but, well, it is. But it only works as well as it does because of the economy of The Wrestler’s construction, and the stealthiness of Aronofsky’s craft.

The Wrestler may not superficially look or feel much like a Darren Aronofsky film, but that fact has too often been stated as relieved praise by people who had grown skeptical of the filmmaker. It’s true that The Wrestler’s style is, at least compared to Aronofsky’s previous two films, bare-bones, and the cutting is relatively sedate, and that the turn to austerity marks a comeback in terms of critical opinion for the filmmaker who, with Requiem for a Dream and then The Fountain, tried critical patience with his perceived bottomless indulgence for visual trickery.  But in its own way, it’s just as much of a film built on setpieces as Requiem, and just as dependent on style to draw lines between inner lives and external action and circumstance.

Aronofsky has acknowledged that his goal was to stick to “the documentary style” as much as possible. This goes beyond the almost always hand-held camera: the wrestling scenes were shot at “real” meets staged by the production, with real current and former wrestlers as extras and as Rourke’s opponents, while Tomei learned from and danced alongside professional strippers. There is something undeniably farcical about a name-brand filmmaker (whose wife was recently on the cover of VOGUE, no less), dropping two movie stars into facsimiles of lower-class American life, produced with the “realism” of non-fiction film in mind.

But it works. The documentary tropes end up playing like drag designed to temper the absurdity of the nuts and bolts of Pam and Randy’s jobs and lives; it makes their more melodramatic moments seem all the more plausible. And Aronofsky knows when he can get away with casting off his realism (as when Randy makes an entrance at his supermarket job to the sound of a crowd cheering in anticipation), and when he can’t. The stylistic quick-change allows us to transform back and forth between objective observer and subjective participant. As a filmmaker, you could say Aronofsky has moved from digital surrealism to a photorealist presentation of a hyperreal world.

If Aronofsky gets away with his constructed reality, its a testament to the work of screenwriter (and former Onion writer) Rob Siegel that The Wrestler’s characterizations can be comical, but never really condescending. And in the ways in which Randy and Pam find common ground, the filmmakers carry across a subtext of cultural critique. At the risk of giving too much away, both Randy and Pam traffic in a kind of fear of intimacy for a living: they take on personas that are very much about what their bodies look like and how they can move and what kind of power they can exert, and they perform for crowds looking for a kind of vicarious thrill, but their admirers never see anything but the surface. Both past their prime to some extent, at one point the pair bond on their mutual nostalgia for the 80s, particularly the music, which Randy says was all about having fun. “And then that pussy Cobain had to come along and ruin it for everyone,” he gripes. “The 90s sucked,” Pam agrees.

The Wrestler is about two people whose professions are in some way dependent on 80s-dated, surface oriented ideas of gender and entertainment and escape, who were left behind in a way when pop culture took a turn away from fantasy, towards something supposedly more authentic, more real. But fantasy is a tool that most of us use to deal with reality. In some way, that dealing process has been the subject of each of Aronofsky’s films, which makes The Wrestler one of a piece.