Don’t call it a comeback: The grimy boxing melodrama Southpaw is so old-fashioned and unsophisticated it’s almost new. Initiated as a remake of 1979’s sap-soaked The Champ with Eminem in the lead role, it morphed into yet another opportunity for Jake Gyllenhaal to prove he’s a contender. When he finally gets that Oscar he so clearly covets, it’ll likely as not be a make-up award for his spooky turn as a sociopathic TV news cameraman in Nightcrawler last year.
Gyllenhaal isn’t quite that good in Southpaw, but he’s still pretty great. The orphan-turned-ex-con-turned-light-heavyweight champion Gyllenhaal plays is named Billy Hope — a sign of the degree of subtlety in Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter’s screenplay, wherein every plot turn is as telegraphed as a tomato can’s jab. I didn’t care: Enough of it felt earned to me that Southpaw wins on points. With movies and TV inching ever closer to the meta singularity that will render all earnestness extinct, a film that doubles down on performance and dares to tell a simple story simply feels vaguely punk rock.
Or at least punk rock-era. In ’70s-cinema terms, Southpaw is a mashup of Rocky and Kramer vs. Kramer — though it borrows more from the latter, actually. When Billy’s wife (Rachel McAdams, trading in her True Detective Ka-Bar collection for a slinky dress and big hoop earrings) exits the scene, he falls into a tailspin, losing his boxing license, his manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), his fancy house, and finally, custody of his 10-year-old daughter Leila. (Oona Laurence avoids the cereal-commercial poise that makes most child actors so grating.) Billy’s need for income, so that he can convince a judge that he’s fit for fatherhood, is what sends him to the gym run by Tick Wills, who trained the only boxer ever to beat him. (Billy still got the decision, but he suspects that was because someone in his camp paid a bribe. “The fight game, you know,” he shrugs.)
Wills is the movie’s other bravura performance. Can it be true that the great Forest Whitaker has never played a crusty, philosophically inclined fight trainer before now? With a glass eye that doesn’t match his real one? Who is secretly a big softie who lets the neighborhood kids train for free but fines them 50 pushups for cursing? It seems impossible, and yet IMDB insists ’tis so. Whatever: There’s great pleasure to be had from watching Gyllenhaal and Whitaker play lonely, inarticulate guys trying squint and grunt — and above all, sweat — their way to revelation.