The Iron Claw (2023)

Indulge me a quick childhood memory. Please.

Preteen Phil (that’s me) was an avid professional wrestling fan. Growing up in Oklahoma City of the late 1970s, I religiously followed Mid-South Wrestling and spent many a Friday night at the State Fairgrounds to see National Wrestling Association stalwarts such as Harley Race (the NWA heavyweight champ!), Dirty Dick Murdoch, Skandor Akbar, Ernie Ladd and Ox Baker. I don’t recall whether I fully understood that the winners and losers of matches were preordained, but I doubt I would have cared. The heroes-and-villains theatricality of it all – or the babyfaces and heels, to put it in the parlance of pro wrestling – was the live-action equivalent of the comic books that I consumed weekly. I loved it.

Some NWA superstars, however, were less accessible. And so it was that my dad, whose generosity and patience knew no bounds, drove us to Dallas one weekend to check out the three Von Erich brothers – Kevin, Kerry and David – in a tag-team main event. I don’t remember who they fought, which makes me think it wasn’t one of the Texas brothers’ big nemeses. We took our seats in the Sportatorium, a drafty, glorified barn on the outskirts of downtown Dallas that reeked of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. I remember that the Von Erich patriarch, ex-wrestler-turned-promoter Fritz Von Erich, jumped into the ring at one point and clocked someone over the head with a metal folding chair. Chaos ensued. Someone got body slammed on the concrete floor ringside. Blood flowed freely. I was in bliss.

My pro wrestling fandom disappeared many moons ago, but the memory of that momentous night flooded back to me during an early scene of The Iron Claw. In a sweeping crane shot (or maybe a drone, who the hell knows anymore?), cars packed with rassling fans converge on the long-gone Sportatorium as the 1979 Dallas skyline glints in twilight. In that instant I was 11-years-old again and back in the passenger side of our family Chrysler LeBaron as we turned into the parking lot to see wrestling’s most celebrated family dynasty.

Movies, am I right?

It sounds like a backhanded compliment to call The Iron Claw the best-ever movie about professional wrestling (I mean, really, what’s the competition other than Aronofsky’s The Wrestler? Paradise Alley? The One and Only?), but writer-director Sean Durkin deserves credit for staging wrestling action that is convincing and exciting. He shows how wrestlers confer to map out matches beforehand but allow for punishing improvisation to take place inside the ring. And the actors portraying the Von Erich brothers – Zac Efron as Kevin, Harris Dickinson as David, The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as Kerry and Stanley Simons as Mike – suitably resemble muscle-bound titans.

Chronicling the professional glories and personal tragedies of the Von Erich family, The Iron Claw is first-rate melodrama. An opening black-and-white prologue introduces us to Holt McCallany as Jack Adkisson, stage name Fritz Von Erich, starting to achieve wrestling fame in the early 1960s with his signature move, “the iron claw,” which is essentially putting a claw-hold to an opponent’s forehead. With his dutiful wife Doris (an underused Maura Tierney) and young sons in tow, Fritz is obsessed with making it to the top of the game.

That drive remains evident when we fast forward to 1979 to find the Von Erich sons grown, bulked up, and eager to please their strict father. Kevin and David have followed their dad’s footsteps into the ring. Kerry is a would-be Olympian in the discus (a dream that will soon be scuttled by President Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Olympics), while Mike, the baby in the family, would prefer to wolf down burgers and play music in a band. Eventually Kerry and Mike would enter the profession, too.

While the movie highlights the wrestling successes of the Von Erichs, it is also clear that the brothers had little choice but to get in the family business. Taskmaster Fritz would have it no other way. Heck, his sons are even stuck replicating dad’s iron claw for their signature move.

Much of The Iron Claw falls on the oversized shoulders of Efron as the clan’s second oldest son (the oldest, Jack Jr., died in a childhood accident). As Kevin’s girlfriend (Lily James) accurately assesses on their first date, he is saddled with an “older brother syndrome” level of protectiveness for his younger siblings. Efron demonstrates serious acting chops, a steroidal hulk with the heart of a broken child desperate for his father’s approval.

That approval grows increasingly remote as the movie progresses. Fritz and Doris Von Erich’s sprawling Texas ranch house is heavily adorned with crucifixes (and firearms, too), but there doesn’t appear to be much room for divine grace in their parenting. Fritz routinely pits the close-knit brothers against one another to spur competition, even telling his sons that he ranks them by favorites (although he magnanimously allows that the rankings can change). After the Von Erichs are rocked by the first of several tragedies, hyper-macho Fritz admonishes his boys, “I don’t want to see any tears.”

Fortunately, there is no such onus on moviegoers, some of whom might be fighting back tears in the emotional third act. In wrestling lore, the Von Erichs were thought to be cursed, but The Iron Claw suggests a number of the tragedies that they weathered stemmed from being pushed by dear old dad. (It should be noted that the real Kevin Von Erich has said the film paints an inaccurate portrait of his late father, whom Kevin calls “a great man.”)

While Durkin takes significant creative license with some of the details, the horrors that befell the Von Erich children are a matter of historical record. The family endured so much sorrow, in fact, that Durkin excised the Von Erichs’ real-life youngest son from the screenplay altogether in an effort to keep the story from being too unbelievably sad.

Still, The Iron Claw is not what I would call a downer. Efron delivers an Oscar-caliber performance that unfortunately might be overlooked in a year with an abundance of outstanding performances. The rest of the cast is just as solid. The movie’s period detail is perfect and perfectly subtle. There are some vintage needle-drops – and who can resist a montage to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”? (answer: no one; it’s a rhetorical question) – but the trappings of the ‘70s and 1980s never feel forced.

At least it worked for my inner 11-year-old.