Like Martin Scorsese’s masterful “Raging Bull” (1980) and David O. Russell’s gritty and searing “The Fighter” (2010) and Bennett Miller’s hauntingly effective “Foxcatcher” (2014), writer-director Sean Durkin’s bruising and mournful “The Iron Claw” is a psychological sports film based on the true story of brothers in the fight game (whether it’s boxing or wrestling) — but whereas the aforementioned films were about pairs of siblings, this story is about four brothers as well as the relentlessly demanding father who believed he was building a dynasty even as he was breaking the entire family.
Actually, there were six Von Erich brothers, five of whom died in heartbreaking fashion. Firstborn son Jack Jr. accidentally drowned at the age of 6. One brother died from enteritis and three others died by suicide. The film references young Jack Jr.’s death, but writer-director Durkin chose to concentrate on four of the surviving five brothers and actually pull back from depicting every single tragedy that plagued the Von Erich clan — and yet we’re still stunned by the seemingly endless barrage of devastating and fatal emotional punches rained down on this family. It’s almost unbelievable, except it all really happened, and “The Iron Claw” depicts these events as a Shakespearean tale by way of 1980s Texas.
