The Rare Sports Crowd-Pleaser You Can Believe In

A middlebrow triumph-against-the-odds sports crowd-pleaser can be a beautiful thing — that is, if it doesn’t pander and lose itself in clichés, and if it has as much respect for reality as it does for getting an inspirational rise out of you. “Unstoppable,” a wrestling drama based on the life of the college champion Anthony Robles, is an honest and stirring entry in the genre, with genuine commercial potential. It has plenty of familiar tropes, but in its no-frills way it touches a nerve of authenticity. The true story it tells is nothing short of extraordinary, and that may be why the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to overhype it.  

In the opening scene, we’re at the High School Nationals in Philadelphia in 2006. Anthony, a senior from Mesa, Ariz., played by the superb Jharrel Jerome (who was Chiron’s love interest in the second segment of “Moonlight” and took over voicing the role of Miles Morales in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”), is getting ready to compete in the championship match. The first thing you notice about him is the first thing that everyone notices: He has only one leg (his left one).

A wrestling spectator asks, in all seriousness, whether this is a charity competition. Her friend makes a nasty joke, saying that she thinks even she could beat him. At that point a woman a few rows away, played by Jennifer Lopez, stands up and says, “That’s my son!” Which kind of shuts them right up. Yet as indefensible as their comments are, there’s a way that they connect with our own point-of-view upon initially seeing Anthony. We look at this one-legged wrestler and think: He’s really got a serious disadvantage — a handicap to overcome. And we think we know just what kind of movie we’re in for.

Actually, though, it’s not that simple. Maybe Anthony does have a disadvantage, but when the match begins, we see that he whips his body around with an aerodynamic finesse, like a break dancer. It’s not as if having one leg is an advantage, but he has evolved a wrestling style out of the body God gave him, and that style is sleek and organic and powerful. He wins the High School Nationals, and from that moment we kind of stop thinking of him as a “one-legged wrestler.” He’s a great wrestler. He’s strong as hell and competitive as hell. He has no self-pity and doesn’t treat the form of his body as a big deal. And the film’s casually amazing visual effects, which digitally erase Jerome’s right leg from every angle on the wrestling floor, only add to the de-exotified immersion.

The night of his victory, he’s the toast of a party, where a scout from Drexel University, in Philly, makes him a dream offer. He invites Anthony to come to college there and says that they’ll give him a full ride ­(tuition, room and board). Anthony seems less than thrilled; Drexel has never won a national wrestling championship, and he’s thinking he’ll hold out for something better. We in the audience are already in our primed-for-the-gold sports-movie mode (Anthony ducks out of the party to stand, alone at night, in the footsteps of his hero, Rocky Balboa, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art), and we may think, “Yeah, that’s right. Shoot for the best!”

But the road to triumph is tricky. No other college reaches out to recruit Anthony; his options are limited. He thinks he might prefer to go to Arizona State University, in his hometown of Mesa, because they do indeed have champions. But when he meets with the coach, Shawn Charles (Don Cheadle), all the coach can offer him is no scholarship and the chance to be a “walk-in.” In other words, he’ll have to compete to make the team, but he’ll be up against players who have already been recruited.

The weight of real-world options, and how limited they can be, is already bearing down on Anthony. And that’s the quality that “Unstoppable” has as a movie. It was directed by William Goldenberg (his first feature), the gifted film editor who edited “Argo” and “Air” and (with Dylan Tichenor) “Zero Dark Thirty,” and it was produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Artists Equity. The story it tells, while it will ultimately put that lump in your throat, is marbled with disappointment and domestic trauma. It’s closer, in spirit, to David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” than it is to movies like “Remember the Titans” or “Hoosiers.”  

At home, Anthony relies on his mother, Judy, played by Lopez in what may be the fullest screen performance she has ever given. He’s got a whole bunch of younger siblings of assorted races, but his father, Rick, is a real piece of work. He’s a testy passive-aggressive lout, a prison guard who turns everything into a fight. Cannavale plays him with a “Black” accent that registers as a terrifyingly lived-in affectation. Rick makes an official show of supporting Anthony, but he can’t stop challenging him, picking away at his achievements. After a while, you realize he’s one of those awful fathers who sees everyone, even his own children, as rivals. The father in the wrestling drama “The Iron Claw” was a domestic fascist who wrecked his son’s lives, but Cannavale’s Rick is almost more insidious, because he soft-pedals the destroyer inside. That Anthony isn’t his biological son is the icing on the abusive cake.

Jharrel Jerome gives a quiet performance, and we’re so used to a certain level of bluster in movie sports heroes that, at first, we register that quietude as a recessive quality, as if Anthony’s missing limb had made him serious and circumspect. But as the movie goes on, you realize that Jerome’s dialed-down acting is simply his way of playing Anthony as a real human being — an incredibly specific soul who feels his feelings but doesn’t broadcast them. He’s gentle and pensive, with eyes that are orbs of intensity. The way his solo leg has marked his identity is that he’s willing to literally bust himself to succeed.

He does go to ASU, and in one of the daily training sessions, the wrestlers trying out for the team have to run three miles up to the top of a rocky cactus-strewn mountain. Anthony does it on crutches. That’s how much he wants it. He shows up at the gym earlier than anyone, and he hoists huge weights during exercises; it’s his way of using the greater demands he puts on himself to offset how he was born.

Yet his ultimate challenge isn’t the leg — it’s what’s happening at home. Rick blows up and leaves, then comes back, only to have his ultimate dysfunction revealed, which is financial. Lopez makes Judy a mother who loves her aspiring athlete-star son but is cornered, plowed under by life. Lopez makes you feel the wrung-out despair, as well as the will she summons, as an act of love, to overcome it. The compelling quality of “Unstoppable” is that it never makes beating the odds — at home, or in the wrestling arena — look overly easy.

The movie is not visually showy, but that’s part of its appeal. The interior of the Robles home is warm but dingy; it’s no castle. Don Cheadle has a restrained elegance playing the sports coach as terse guru. And what Anthony is aiming for has a grounded purity to it. Wrestling is a sport without that much big money connected to it (unless you count “pro wrestling,” which is a different thing entirely). Anthony finally makes it to the NCAA Champion matches, where he faces off against an undefeated hulk, Matt McDonough (Johnni DiJulius), who the film, to its credit, never suggests is his own Ivan Drago. Even Matt the bruiser is a rooted character. By the end, though, you might just get a touch of that real-life “Rocky” feeling, because the movie has earned it.