Dwayne Johnson in Benny Safdie MMA Film

Sticks, stones, body blows and multiple knees to the head may break his bones, but names are what do real damage to pioneering UFC fighter Mark Kerr, a beast of a man who could crush opponents in the ring and fall apart as soon as he stepped outside it.

In Benny Safdie’s compellingly gritty and offbeat biopic, The Smashing Machine, Kerr wavers between hot and cold, passive and aggressive, chilled-out on the couch and pulverizing a door in his living room, showcasing a fragility that’s way bigger than his ballooning biceps. Played by Dwayne Johnson in the wrestler-turned-actor’s most absorbing turn yet, the mixed martial arts champ anchors a rise-and-fall fight flick that takes many cues from the genre but never delivers a Rocky-style knockout — nor does it even try to.

Marking the director’s first feature made apart from his brother, Josh, the film retains much of what rendered the Safdies’ work so original: a stylized moody realism; a cast mixing trained actors with regular people; an overall downbeat vibe enlivened by flashes of raw humor and energy; and stories carried by protagonists often addicted to something, whether it’s theft (The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Good Time), drugs (Heaven Knows What) or gambling (Uncut Gems).

Sports have also been a Safdie staple, from their melancholic b-ball doc Lenny Cooke to Adam Sandler’s obsession with the NBA in Gems, and this may explain why both bros chose to make solo debuts about two very particular kinds of professional athletes. In Josh’s case, that would be a 1950s table tennis star in his upcoming Marty Supreme, whereas Benny focuses here on an ex-college wrestler duking it out in the early years of the UFC, when fighters were far from household names and the sport wasn’t yet a billion-dollar behemoth (not to mention a favorite of America’s current president).

Set between 1997 and 2000, a period which saw Kerr punching, headbutting and grappling his way through tournaments in the U.S., Brazil and Japan, Safdie’s script underscores how the UFC started as a fringe organization whose poorly paid brawls usually ended in blood. The violence is what both repelled and attracted the public, and it eventually takes its toll on Kerr, who practices mixed martial arts as a discipline requiring rigorous training, which he does with best bud and fellow MMA fighter Mark Coleman.

The latter is played by former UFC fighter Ryan Bader in a convincingly grounded performance, while Kerr’s trainer for his final bouts is played by UFC legend Bas Rutten. This means that three of the four main cast members in The Smashing Machine are real heavyweights with bulging cauliflower ears. (Johnson’s were impressively created by prosthetic designer Kazu Hiro, who makes the actor nearly unrecognizable.) And yet Safdie coaxes great turns out of all of them, focusing on the gristly camaraderie the men share — how they may look mean as hell in the ring but are more like gentle giants in person.  

In fact, Kerr is such a sweetheart that he tends to gets stomped on by his longtime girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt), who winds up posing a greater threat to him than any of his opponents. Aggressive, nagging, constantly chewing gum in an obnoxious manner, but also supportive and loving when Kerr hits some seriously rough patches throughout the narrative, Dawn is both the bedrock for the fighter’s rollercoaster of a career and his Achilles’ heel.

Safdie stages their squabbles as intensely as the ones in the octagon, in a movie that shifts between the pounding blows Kerr puts up with as a pro fighter and the mental anguish Dawn gives him at home. This isn’t to say she’s solely responsible for all the domestic drama: Kerr is under so much pressure that he can be impossible to live with, going from intensive training periods when he judges how well Dawn makes his protein shakes in the morning, to opiate-fueled binges that leave him comatose on the bathroom floor. Still, the film stacks the cards rather heavily against its female lead, forcing Blunt to play a woman who seems to do more harm than good to the man she loves.

Kerr’s many weaknesses are also the strengths of a story in which fights are lost more often than they’re won. The Smashing Machine may borrow some tropes from the sports genre, such as a fun training montage set to Elvis’ version of “My Way,” or multiple scenes of journalists interviewing the fighters in Japan. In truth it’s a movie much less about athletic victory than human vulnerability, and thus falls in line with other Safdie bros flicks about likable losers getting hammered by everything life tosses at them.  

Johnson has rarely played a loser, but he’s always been likable, displaying a massive grin to match his massive pecs in action vehicles that never allowed him to showcase much range. He manages to go deep here without overdoing it, killing the audience with kindness as a benign warrior who suffers from one scene to the next, triumphing briefly in the ring before succumbing to addiction and/or romantic grief. Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler — a film from which Safdie seems to take a few cues — the actor delivers an intoxicating mix of blood, sweat, tears, protein and total helplessness.

Those elements fuel Kerr as he finally kicks his opiate habit and makes his way to the kind of finale you’d expect from any good fight flick, with the chance to face his bestie Coleman in a Tokyo-set championship organized by Pride (a rival Japanese group that the UFC swallowed up in 2007). But The Smashing Machine is more Raging Bull than Rocky, refusing to give combat fans what they want in a downbeat ending that doubles down on the realism, not to mention the traumas caused by so much violence.

Realism is also a big part of the film’s grungy and unflashy aesthetic. DP Maceo Bishop (who worked with Safdie on his Showtime series, The Curse) captures the action documentary-style with long lenses and lots of grain, while production designer James Chinlund highlights how unglamorous Kerr’s world is, from the chintzy ballroom arena where he wins his first MMA fights to the bland Arizona home he shares with Dawn. Costumes by Heidi Bivens show how the late-90s wasn’t exactly a bastion of sophistication, at least in the world of mixed martial arts.

For a movie anchored by an actor who became famous for his staged bouts in the WWE, The Smashing Machine’s greatest attribute may be the way much of it doesn’t feel fake at all. Excluding some of the drama with Dawn, which goes a bit overboard in the last act, Safdie succeeds in making Kerr’s struggles as lifelike as possible. When, in a late switcheroo that’s yet another fit of realism, the actual Kerr briefly replaces Johnson, it’s 25 years later and he looks nothing like the man we’ve been watching. Yet he seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.