Certain films about life's losers have a desperately moving appeal. Darren Aronofsky's “The Wrestler," starring Mickey Rourke as a broken-down professional wrestling star still living off the fumes of his 1980s glory days, could touch a chord in audiences in a way recalling "On the Waterfront" and "Rocky." They share the same kind of lyrical humanity.

Rourke plays Randy "The Ram" Robinson, who was once a golden-god gladiator with his own action figure and video game. Now, he's a wreck on painkillers, with pulverized bones and a hearing aid, but he still wrestles before small crowds.

In "The Wrestler," Mickey Rourke looks like some bloated, freakazoid Sammy Hagar, and he makes viewers feel the way Randy subjects his body to punishment to remind himself he's still alive. Aronofsky, shooting in a grainy, bare-bones style, plays off Rourke's fallen-icon status by feasting on that spectacular, pulped wreck of a face.

Miraculously, Rourke's softness remains. He gives Randy a deep, slow voice of disarming gentleness.

Aronofsky burns through the fakery of wrestling in a touching way, by letting viewers see how the trumped-up enemies in the ring actually love and support each other. And the director brings audiences piercingly close to the life of a relic.

Randy, when he's not in the ring, is basically a polite, saddened middle-aged man who lives in a New Jersey trailer park. He's a scared, insecure dude who never got over his given name - Robin. But he tries to reconnect to life through two women: Marisa Tomei, playing a stripper who's taken a liking to him, and Evan Rachel Wood, playing his furious estranged daughter.

The movie presents Randy as a man who has lost nearly everything, yet he can still reach for grace. "The Wrestler" is like “Rocky” made by the young Martin Scorsese. It's the rare movie fairy tale that's also a bravura work of art.