Critic's Notebook

A24

On the heels of their breakout, “Uncut Gems,” the Safdie brothers are headed for a breakup. Both have solo stuff coming out this awards season via A24. First up is Venice International Film Festival competition title “The Smashing Machine,” written and directed by Benny Safdie, the younger sibling who has been in the public eye a lot more thanks to his side job acting in films like “Licorice Pizza” and “Oppenheimer.”

The new film is a biopic on early mixed martial arts star Mark Kerr, who was also the subject of John Hyams’s 2002 HBO documentary, “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.” Aside from the shared title, there’s quite a bit of overlap in terms of narrative.

The new film reenacts the documentary substantially, not just the M.M.A. matches but also vignettes like a black-eyed Mark, played by Dwayne Johnson, gently explaining his sport to a repulsed woman in the waiting room of a clinic. What’s more, the fictionalized account also employs the vérité style of handheld camera and zooms associated with nonfiction filmmaking.

Both cover Mr. Kerr ‘s undefeated rise on the Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, subsequent pivot to Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships when American politicians sought to ban the U.F.C. and his battles with addiction, his partner, Dawn (Emily Blunt plays the fictionalized counterpart), and himself.

Mr. Johnson as Mr. Kerr is just about as on the nose as Bill Goldberg portraying Jesse Ventura. Physicality and athletic skills aside, Mr. Johnson does rise to the occasion as a performer. Not once does he raise his eyebrow. I am not familiar with how Mr. Kerr acted back in the day, but at minimum, Mr. Johnson here registers more as John Cena-esque than as a version of himself. Most importantly, he does delineate the juxtaposition of Mark’s public and private personae. M.M.A. fighter Ryan Bader, in his big-screen debut as Mark’s friend and trainer Mark Coleman, also makes quite an impression.

There’s an existing, well-worn trope of underdog stories in sports. Mr. Safdie resists a lot of that low-hanging fruit. The prime example is a montage of Mark undergoing a strict regimen in preparation for a championship, wherein Nala Sinephro’s score doesn’t attempt to conjure up that “Rocky” shorthand.

Though set in the ’90s, Mr. Safdie’s film feels a bit more dated than that. If it weren’t for the intertitles up front, the film would seem placed in the ’80s given James Chinlund’s production design. Aesthetically, this recalls something like “Love Lies Bleeding.” But perhaps the film’s most glaring shortcoming is the lack of character development for Dawn. Since it remains ambiguous as to whether she’s a victim of domestic abuse, her erratic behavior comes off more as manifestations of narcissistic personal disorder.

The last scene shows the real-life Mr. Kerr shopping for groceries in present day. Since Mr. Safdie decides to go there in addition to just giving the man his flowers, it would have been nice to know what he’d been up to since retiring from fighting. A scene like that would certainly help hammer home its main idea that there’s indeed more to life than just winning and losing.