Written and directed by Sean Durkin, The Iron Claw is a magisterial study of wrestling’s Von Erich brothers, and the so-called Von Erich Curse that befell them. Raised by ex-wrestler Fritz von Erich, played here by Holt McCallany, brothers Kevin (Zac Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and David (Harris Dickinson) became the face of professional wrestling as it reached its popular and charismatic apex in the early 1980s, with fourth brother Mike (Stanley) and mother Doris (Maura Tierney) taking a back seat. From 1983, however, the family suffered a series of heartbreaking tragedies. First, David died while on tour in Japan, from a ruptured intestine. Then, Kerry lost his foot in a motorcycle accident, ushering in a deep depression that culminated with his suicide. Finally, Mike took up the wrestling mantle and defended the family name, only to dislocate his shoulder in his first professional appearance, requiring routine surgery that went awry, and resulted in a septic infection that impaired his speech and mobility, thwarting his aspirations of becoming a professional musician. He too took his own life, leaving only Kevin to commemorate and celebrate the lives of his brothers, along with his wounded and grieving parents. The Iron Claw is the story of that family saga, and  a tribute to the collective charisma that ushered many viewers into their first wrestling fandom.

From the opening sequence, which depicts a wrestling bout in ultra-stylised slow-motion and exquisitely rendered black-and-white, it’s clear that Durkin is aiming for a fight classic on the scale of Raging Bull, even if his aesthetic vision of the early 80s turns out to be very different. For Durkin quickly shifts to the gorgeous period atmospherics of The Nest, crafting an endless summer of ebullient brotherhood that feels coated in thick layers of bronzer. The first half of The Iron Claw is a tribute to this extraordinary fraternity, and a portrait of a quartet of brothers who love nothing more than spending time together. At one point, Kevin affirms that “just being together we can do anything” and later spends his time at a party enjoining one person after another to “look at my beautiful brothers.” When he grows up there’s nothing he wants more than for all of his brothers to live with him on a ranch, where they can wrestle, work out, farm the land and remain in continuous charismatic and physical proximity.

That love of brotherhood thus expands out into an affirmation of the way men express their jouissance and flamboyance through action, activity and sport. From the moment we meet Kerry shaping a discus with the Olympic Athletics team, the brothers communicate and commune through their bodies, with a skin-to-skin rapport that splits the difference between reality and artifice during the wrestling scenes. Mentally the opponents know that there is a certain amount of artifice but physically everything is real, part of a complex dialogue of aggression, respect, love and flamboyant self-expression. It works, then, that the three wrestling brothers all have a peculiarly physical screen presence and a real aptitude for acting with their bodies. Dickinson started as a model, Efron was the sex symbol for a generation and White thrives on roles, like The Bear, in which he retreats to a brooding physical presence. In other words, The Iron Claw is a tribute to the physicality of brotherly love, which imbues every mise-en-scene with an extraordinary and intoxicating sense of flow. The Von Erichs are always moving in tandem, whether strutting into the ring, dancing at a wedding, training together or just jostling around. They always feel a little too big for their clothes, for the spaces they’re in and for their own personal space, meaning they’re always sharing and spilling over into each other’s spaces, like they’re cocooned in a shared proprioceptive threshold. This flow is easily ample and generous enough to absorb Mike, their non-wrestling brother as well – in fact, these tend to be the moments when their shared flow finds its apex.

Along the way, The Iron Claw becomes a tribute to the NWA, the National Wrestling Association, as an emblem of this charismatic physicality, suffusing the film with a deep nostalgia for wrestling media as it existed before the digital era. Durkin’s beautiful mise-en-scenes are continually intercut with archival television footage that emphasises both the grandeur and the silliness of these heady days of wrestling, along with how flamboyantly they fused ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine aesthetics, as when Ric Flair struts into the ring clad in pink sequins and fur. Wrestling here is a language commensurate to brotherhood at its most profound, as we see on the night of Kevin’s wedding, when he squeezes into a toilet cubicle with David, reveals and revels in the fact that he is also about to become a father, but still affirms nothing gives him more pleasure in life than being in the ring with all his brothers.

From there, the film takes a sharp turn into the Von Erich curse as this flow overtakes the brothers and becomes a death drive. No doubt Fritz’s aspirational and inspirational rhetoric starts to curdle but to Durkin’s credit he never turns this decline into a trite allegory. The tragedy of the brothers could so easily become a naff commentary in which the curse is little more than toxic male expectation and while that is certainly part of it – Fritz continually ranks his sons in terms of how they live up to his ideal for the family – The Iron Claw also eulogises a brotherly camaraderie that has been damaged by precisely this over-regulation of male forms of communion. So many texts in the present moment exude a suspicion and erosion of fraternal kinship, and of the ways men connect through physical activity, and yet Durkin’s achievement is to dismantle hyper-masculinity while acknowledging the enduring appeal of brotherhood, both familial and social. The Von Erichs all start to disintegrate from the moment they lose David, and by the time Kevin is left alone his cognitive dissonance reaches an unbearable pitch. Without brothers he has no outlet for his physical self, and so he resorts to running maniacally from one side of the ring to the other, or contorting himself and raining down punches on himself in the same tortured pose, trying to be four brothers in one body. It turns out that the whole institution of marriage is also mediated through brotherhood, not simply in Kevin’s thwarted desire to have all of his brothers and their families live with him on a ranch but his temporary separation from his wife for fear the Von Erich curse will continue.

Just as each brother leaves a missive behind – a postcard and two suicide notes – that allow them to continue communing beyond the grave, so this modulation of hyper-masculinity into a more manageable relationality takes the form of two distinct afterlives. In the first, we see Kerry, David and Mike sharing a group hug in a heavenly pastoral realm, along with a young boy who turns out to be Kevin’s older brother, who died in early childhood. While they may be shorn of their wrestling apparatus, and aeons away from the aggressive purview of Fritz’s training regimen, their rapport is still framed first and foremost in physical terms. The second afterlife occurs back in the real world, where Kevin breaks into tears while playing football with his sons, explaining to them that he is grieving the fact of no longer being a brother. Again, while they may comfort him, and tell him that it is fine for men to cry, this entire exposition of healthy masculinity is still mediated through the football that is folded into their group hug, envisasging a world in which a more remediatory manhood can still exist alongside the old rituals of physical connection. And the film ends with this same football being tossed in the air, in an echo of the flamboyant hand gestures of the Von Erichs at their peak, a beautifully hopeful vision of the future for a such a deft take on how men connect and relate.