Everything is fleeting – glory, fame, money, love, kindness, a home, a family, romance, sex, drugs, rock and roll. That’s The Wrestler put into stark terms. Seen by itself, this new drama from is a somewhat generic, by-the-numbers sports drama about a performer seeing his life on the stage fade into the twilight. But with Mickey Rourke, with his long history of personal and professional drama, cast as its lead, The Wrestler takes on a whole different dimension. Whether that makes the movie worthwhile is up to how ‘meta’ you like your films.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler is an unsparing, brutal look into a world, that of professional wrestling, rarely seen from backstage. Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a former wrestling star who, two decades later, now performs on weekends in school gyms and VA centers, works a side-job on the weekdays at a grocery store, and lives in a trailer he can’t afford. He’s estranged from his daughter, Stephanie, played here by Evan Rachel Wood on high-strung mode, and his only emotional connection is a veteran stripper, Cassidy, at a local topless bar, played by a wonderful Marisa Tomei.

The writer, Robert Siegel, keeps things simple, showing the routine of Randy’s life, and errs on the side of explaining less rather than risk breaking the realism. It’s a refreshingly simple job by a new screenwriter.

It plays as a critique and a glamorization of this 80s-obsessed, hard-rock, hard-living niche of society. Shot handheld, the grainy footage takes us into the daily lives of these professionals, if we can really call them that. The process of entertaining is extensive: Randy gets his hair dyed, gets a tan, finds new props, takes enough medication and illegal drugs to kill an elephant, goes over moves with his opponent, attends fan-signings. Matches are shown as ugly, violent affairs. Blood is shed, skin is torn, bodies bruised and broken. After each, Randy emerges looking like a warrior coming home from battle, his face a pageant of blood and his body scarred with more stories of glory from the ring.

It’s all presented so realistically, so matter-of-fact, that it takes a while to remember how ridiculous it all is. These are grown men, dressing up in spandex, and beating the crap out of each other. The glory these men feel is short-lived, and feels almost empty with the high costs of physical impairment that comes with it.

For Aronofsky, this is a major side-step from his previous work, which relied on heavy-handed editing and a vicious sense of tragedy to compel audiences to feel – and feel strongly – for his star-crossed characters. Pi was a convoluted portrait of an obsessed mind of a mathematician; Requiem for a Dream was a frenetic and tortured tale of drug addiction; and The Fountain was a dreamy, fantastical love story, set across thousands of years, plundering the depth of a single romance over and over. In each, the director explored people driven to terrible lengths by their obsessions.

In The Wrestler, that obsession is Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s desperate need for glory and the approval of the crowd. Sadly, sic transit gloria and all that.

Most of us know of Rourke’s own personal fall from grace, and that knowledge can add a certain meta-appreciation for the film, giving it an added level. But if you look at the picture by itself, is there anything more than a tired performer trying to recapture what he’s lost?

Tomei and Rourke are reason enough to see this movie but, for anyone who has spent the last decade marveling at Aronofsky’s career, The Wrestler is a step backwards. It’s a genre movie, yes, and a well-made one at that. But it’s a peculiar world with a limited appeal. Do we really need to see the seedy underbelly of professional wrestling?