Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Iron Claw’ on VOD, a Gripping Drama About a Family of Doomed Wrestlers, Led by an Extraordinary Zac Efron

Full disclosure: Professional wrestling drives me bats. But movies about professional wrestling? That’s another story. The Iron Claw (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) takes the prestige-drama route in dramatizing the story of the Von Erich brothers, real-life wrestlers beset with so much tragedy, it not only inspired talk of a “Von Erich curse,” but it also couldn’t all fit in one movie (one of the six brothers is cut out entirely, lest the film become unwieldy). Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Nest) writes and directs, with a cast led by Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), now in full career bloom, and Zac Efron, who’s jacked-up physique and gruesome bowl cut renders him one coat of green paint away from being the old TV version of the Incredible Hulk. Don’t take that as a warning, though – Efron was 100 percent screwed out of an Oscar nomination for playing a slab of muscle who finally, after a lifetime of suffering, learns that it’s OK for “real men” to cry.

THE IRON CLAW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) is a heel. That’s wrestling slang for “villain,” if you’re not aware. He hops into the ring amidst a shower of boos and makes the good guys suffer in the grip of the Iron Claw, a signature move in which he violently grips his opponent’s cranium and squeeeeeezzzzzzes. We meet him circa 1960, when he and his tolerant (at best?) wife Doris (Maura Tierney) and their two young boys lived in a travel trailer, touring the wrestling circuit. He dedicated his life to making big-time wrestling a career, but he never truly made the big time. He never won a championship belt.

By 1979, Fritz is pretty much done in the ring, and has settled on a farm in Dallas, where the garage is full of weightlifting gear and the driveway boasts a full-size wrestling ring. He runs the Sportatorium, where he features his sons in bouts in front of frenzied fans and ESPN viewers in the early days of cable. Kevin (Efron) is the star for now, Fritz priming him for a heavyweight title match. David (Harris Dickinson) is Kevin’s tag-team partner, and good at shit-talking to the camera, one of the skills of pro wrestling entertainment outside of wild physical feats. Kerry (White) is an Olympic hopeful, although his dream is derailed when President Carter boycotts the 1980 Moscow games. And Mike (Stanley Simons) is the youngest, who doesn’t look like he bench presses Frigidaires – he’d rather be a musician, and that’s why, when Fritz ranks his sons, Mike always comes in last.

Yes, he ranks his sons, just like Deion Sanders. The list is fluid, at least. You’d think this might seriously toxify sibling relationships, but you also could make an argument that it only makes them tighter. They do everything together, whether they’re training, working on the property or tossing back brewskis at a party. Two scenes illustrate the tone of their relationship with their parents: In one, Kevin asks his mother if they can talk about something, and she coolly replies, “That’s what your brothers are for.” In the other, Fritz interrupts the boys while they’re putting up a fence, pulls Kerry aside and tells him, since his Olympic dream is kaput, that he’ll be a wrestler now too. To say Kerry is honored by this quasi-anointment isn’t a stretch; in the Von Erich house, wrestling is religion. That’s why we get a series of establishing shots showing us a cabinet full of trophies, a cabinet full of guns, a crucifix and a grimfaced family portrait in which nobody is smiling. Game faces only. That’s how it works around here. You stiff-upper-lip your way through life and that’s it.

I can hear you doing math: We know the sixth brother didn’t make the cut, but what about the fifth? He was the firstborn son, but he died young, when Kevin was five. That makes Kevin the de facto oldest, although he’ll never be the oldest, if that makes sense. We learn this during a tender moment: Kevin’s on his first date with Pam (Lily James), who, upon hearing this tragic anecdote, gives him a long, sweet, nourishing hug. He explains to her how wrestling matches are scripted, but you can ascend to bigger matches by proving your mettle physically and as an entertainer. (Let’s face it – we non-wrestling fans needed to hear that, too.) He also shares how his real last name is Adkisson, but they’ve all taken on his father’s stage surname – and now he’s worried that his family is cursed by it. That, he believes, is why Jack Jr. died. “I don’t believe in curses,” Pam replies. And so she sticks with him.

Mike drops “Tom Sawyer” by Rush on the turntable and time accelerates as Kevin, Kerry and David triple-tag-team their way to national wrestling fame. They take cross-country bus trips to matches. They party hard – especially Kerry, who does coke and kegstands and steroids. They shave their legs backstage. Fritz gives them lessons in tearing phone books in half and, of course, administering the Iron Claw. One night in the locker room, Fritz comes in and says David has earned the right to fight Ric Flair in Japan for the championship belt – the championship belt Fritz could never get, mind you. At Pam and Kevin’s wedding reception, Kevin walks into the bathroom and hears someone getting sick in the stall. It’s David. He’s puking up blood. He’s also set to go to Tokyo next week. This is where the Von Erich curse awakens. And all Kevin can do is despair. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Wrestler is an obvious touchstone; Efron’s physical transformation echoes De Niro’s in Raging Bull; and even though it’s about not-fake wrestling, Foxcatcher exists in the same obsessed/dysfunctional-character ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: Efron is remarkable, bordering on just-plain-great as an inarticulate and sensitive man who seems as trapped in his family as he is in his overstuffed sausage of a body. “Soulful” is the perfect descriptor for Efron’s work; did we know he had it in him? 

Memorable Dialogue: Another great moment from the first date:

Pam: What do you want out of life, Kevin Von Erich?

Kevin: More ribs?

Sex and Skin: A short scene in which we don’t see much but that the MPAA would label “sexual situations.”

Our Take: “Just being together, we can do anything.” Kevin’s assessment of life with his siblings is earnest and true, and his expression of it is all the more heartbreaking when the brotherhood is shattered by death and literal dismemberment. The Iron Claw is a gut-wrenching American tragedy, a dramatic portrait of a family whose state of perpetual emotional denial set them up for great hardship. There’s no simple and easy summation of the Von Erich dynamic, although it seems primarily defined by Fritz’s quest for a masculine ideal, while Doris stands by, inert, outnumbered and possibly overwhelmed. The most compelling element of this dynamic is rooted in pro wrestling itself, with Fritz obsessed by “winning” in a “sport” that’s not technically a sport, and therefore isn’t beholden to statistical declarations of victory. The goal is nebulous glory, and the path to it – despite being violent to both body and mind – is equally nebulous, and that makes equating wrestling with religion all the more poignant.

Nurture proves to be a powerful force in this story, Fritz bequeathing his show-must-go-on entertainment-biz mentality to his boys. When one of them dies, he doesn’t mourn, or share his feelings, or even cry; he simply elevates another son to the center ring. It’s the next-man-up reality of sports, where a hideous injury prompts a brief pause before the coach drops in the backup player so the game may continue. When it comes to the human psyche, though, this approach is profoundly dysfunctional. The Von Erich’s don’t process their emotions – in the wake of death, or simply losing an opportunity to climb a rung on the pro wrestling ladder – and they curdle into thoughts of hopelessness and suicide.

Early in the film, before catastrophe begins to snowball, Kevin senses this. His attempts to speak plainly about his feelings are shut down at home, but embraced by Pam, who’s the quiet catalyst for his change. He’s not as reckless as his brothers, not only because he has a wife and kids to take care of, but because he also slowly begins recognizing how human psychology works. He has a degree of mental density to push through, but it eventually works; compare that to his brothers, who refuse to acknowledge their physical and psychological limitations, for fear of disappointing their father. Their father, again, who ranks them, as only a heel would – their father, who’s the villain of this movie, although whether he’s truly corrupt or evil is open for interpretation. 

Again, that’s the central irony of the story – Fritz has used fear and love to unite his sons indelibly. But for what cause? If you’re like Pam and don’t believe in curses, then the Von Erich “curse” is of this earth. Manmade. Inadvertently handcrafted by a father who can’t see past his poisoned vision. The Iron Claw is effective both inside and outside the ring, it seems. Kevin believes in the Von Erich curse, but does he realize that belief is precisely what keeps it alive? The Iron Claw wisely gives no clear answer as to why the Von Erichs, or humans in general, must suffer. It concludes with scenes of equally deep spirituality and pragmatism, and both will absolutely tear your heart out.

Our Call: Absorbing and unsettling, and featuring a career performance from Efron, The Iron Claw is one of the best movies of 2023. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.