Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—is satisfying as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. Safdie, who also wrote the script, tells the story of how real-life mixed-martial artist, UFC champion, and all-around bruiser Mark Kerr won worldwide fame, tumbled down a rabbit hole of opioid addiction, and clawed his way back to sanity and success. And that’s about it: Safdie doesn’t tie the story into excessively dramatic pretzel knots, and he doesn’t try to apply any Rocky-style narrative formulas, as effective as those formulas can be. Instead, he simply trusts his star, Dwayne Johnson, to lead us through Kerr’s story of escalating fame, addiction, and recovery, without resorting to the clichés of so many addiction-recovery dramas. Kerr kicks his habit early in the film—there’s no real spiraling decline, no horrific bottoming out. So what we see through most of the movie is a champion who’s fallen and gotten back up again, asking, Now what? It’s the persistent drive of the “Now what?” that makes the movie work.
The movie opens circa 1997, with Johnson’s Kerr at the top of his game. We hear an announcer running through the play-by-play as we see Kerr squeezing and pummeling the bejesus out of an opponent. “Wow! A magnificent knee to the face, and another knee to the face!” For the uninitiated—before I saw The Smashing Machine, that would be me—the “knee to the face” move was at one time a popular feature of mixed-martial arts, though it has since been essentially banned in the UFC. If you don’t care for fighting as a spectator sport, it’s excruciating to watch. It looks like it really, really hurts, and also like it could kill you. (No wonder Senator John McCain tried to get the MMA banned in 1996, having seen a UFC match and deeming it “human cockfighting.”) But another feature of MMA, at least as it’s depicted in The Smashing Machine, is that guys who engage in…
