Benny Safdie's The Smashing Machine is a lyrical, often poignant, and mostly compelling portrait of Mark Kerr, one of the pioneers of Ultimate Fighting. Sadly, it doesn't exactly reveal anything about its characters beyond what we learn in the first ten minutes. By the end, Kerr is as much of a distant enigma as he is at the start, waving to us from across the room with an unreadable half-smile.

It's lucky the two hours we spend with his on-screen version, played by Dwayne Johnson, are hugely entertaining.

This is mostly due to Johnson, who uses the opportunity to reflect on his own career which, despite a massive and devoted following, has waned in the past decade. He is beloved, but not in the way he probably wished.

As Kerr, Johnson first reminds us of his past iconography as The Rock, wrestler and entertainer supreme, before shedding every bit of that refined armor to reveal a vulnerable, intensely humane performance that will define the next decade of his career.

In one of the best scenes of the film, Kerr loses for the first time. It knocks the wind out of him both physically and emotionally. He's so distressed by the result that he can't even move properly. His body is fighting the reality that things didn't go his way. Johnson brings something to the moment we haven't seen from him before: fear. Kerr is afraid of not just the uncertainty of what's to come, but these emotions he's bottled up for so long.

It is a tremendous piece of directing and acting working together to remind us that beyond the glamour and showmanship, Dwayne Johnson is a bonafide actor waiting to break out of his shell.

Supporting him is Emily Blunt, who is heartbreaking as Kerr's partner, Dawn Staples. Blunt brings immense realism and texture to an underwritten part that Safdie doesn't seem to care about all that much. You could argue her role is to mirror Kerr's defects and provide us with an understanding of how two broken people can feed off each other's insecurities.

But Kerr is constantly afforded more empathy with long sequences reaching into his melancholy and disappointment over unrealized ambitions. Staples, on the other hand, remains an enigma and, at the worst moments, a caricature. It's thanks to Blunt's committed and beautifully nuanced performance that she feels more of a real person than the alternative.

In the ring, Safdie's directing proves far stronger. He pushes past the spectacle and focuses on the intimate stares between fighters, the unspoken agreements that it's nothing personal, and the seconds between victory and loss that feel like the world is ending. We rarely see the audience, because this isn't about them, despite how Kerr insists he's doing it for their approval. Once we're in the ring, the world outside doesn't exist anymore.

Where Safdie's film caught me off-guard was how raw and supportive he allows his supremely masculine cast to get. In this world, the image of ultimate manhood is often held as the standard. Yet here, they're allowed to cry, hug, and support one another in a way we rarely, of ever, see on screen.

It's that vulnerability that makes them so easy to root for. We love an underdog, even moreso when we know they've been kicked when they're down. We want to see them ride and triumph the odds, even when those odds are often self-inflicted.

The Smashing Machine shares DNA with The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's big comeback movie from the late-2000s. That movie didn't revitalize his career in the way most expected, and now serves as a kind of melancholy final note instead of a new beginning.

That won't be the case for Johnson, who is already prepping a more family friendly sequel to Jumanji. But it might be the end for The Rock, the Megastar, and everything that iconography entails.

From those ashes, it is Johnson, the actor, who emerges anew. I hope it's the begining of a long and rich new phase in his career.