A long time ago, I was reporting on a wrestling bill at, of all places, Cheltenham Town Hall when famed “villain” Mick McManus was flung out of the ring and landed on my desk. Fortunately I was only winded. But when he climbed back into the fray, I saw that my pen was stuck in his back.

Plucking it out and returning it to me, Lou Marco, the tiny, equally celebrated ref, said: “You want to watch it, my son. Next time he’ll squash your wherewithal.”

I mention this to inform you that I know a bit about wrestling, a pantomime during which its doughty participants frequently get their wherewithal squashed and often leave the game with other serious injuries. So I can vouch for the veracity of Darren Aronofsky’s movie, in which Mickey Rourke (a former pro boxer) manages even more stunts than Mick McManus because, in America, almost anything goes to sate the bloodthirsty crowds, even stapling your opponent’s flesh and cutting your own surreptitiously with a razor to make things look more real. Lou Marco would never have allowed anything like that, not at Cheltenham Town Hall.

The Wrestler is, in essence, an excellent B-movie centred upon a defiantly top-rate performance from Rourke, who burrows into his own ragged life history to bring to the role an extraordinary authenticity. It does become a little over-sentimental at times, as his crumpled and crumbling Randy “The Ram” Robinson falls for Marisa Tomei’s ageing stripper, who is forbidden to go out with customers, and he attempts gropingly to become the father his now grown-up daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) never really had.

Randy also seems fundamentally too straight a guy to be in such a baleful profession at all. Whether mulling over the moves he and his challengers are going to make before going out for a beer with them, or working patiently in a fast food joint with often obstreperous customers, he seems a very gentle giant of the ring. Once in it, however, almost anything goes, providing it’s been rehearsed. The no-holds-barred approach causes Randy to have a heart attack in the middle of the story, and he has to undergo a bypass. But, after savouring a hopeless life away from wrestling, we know he’ll go back to it.

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Rourke’s remarkable portrait remains in the mind long after you’ve seen the film and may well add an Oscar to his Golden Globe. A sentimental vote it might be, but for once, a deserved one, too. Let’s hope that Mickey gives a better thankyou speech than Kate Winslet. No one could have accomplished this role better, either physically (at 56, Rourke is in impressive condition) or emotionally.

Recovering from his pretentious psychedelic fairytale, The Fountain, after his much praised debut feature, Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky shoots the whole thing almost like a documentary and measures the Ram’s essential and indomitable spirit against the bloody mess of his life.

There’s no real feelgood ending but a palpable sense that this man deserves more than he is likely to get. It’s a parable that doesn’t get us all that far but which is illustrated by Rourke and the two women involved with him with hardly a false note throughout. It’s life in the raw if you like but somehow still worth living.

This is what glues you to the screen, even when you have to turn your eyes away from what is happening in the ring. The Wrestler winds you up and very seldom even tries to wind you down again.