Directed by: David O. Russell
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams
Rating: R

Christian Bale (left) and Mark Wahlberg star in The Fighter. (Courtesy photo)

You wouldn't know it from the first hour and a half of The Fighter, but this is actually a feel-good movie. It's also painful to watch and it's hilarious and it's exciting, and sometimes it's all three at once. It's also a true story. It's the new Rocky—and yes, I mean it's just as good, if not better.

Meet the unassuming Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a small-time boxer in Lowell, Mass. His domineering mother Alice (Melissa Leo) and has-been boxer brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) are, respectively, his manager and his trainer, while his bumbling horde of sisters lives under Alice's iron fist. Micky's a nice guy, but maybe too soft; when things go wrong in the ring, he can't express his concerns to the people backing his boxing career, since that would mean telling off his whole family. Soon he finds himself on a losing streak, a "stepping stone" for others to beat on their way to bigger fights. Meanwhile, an HBO documentary on crack addicts is focusing on Dicky; in a case of pathetic irony, Dicky thinks it's a documentary about the time he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard. Unsettled, but keeping his worries to himself, Micky finds some hope in his girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), who helps him say what needs to be said to the family. As his boxing career begins to move forward, he finds more and more that his family is holding him back. And when he finally gets a shot at the welterweight championship, he realizes he can't avoid confronting his family any longer.

It says something when the weak point of a movie is an actress who got one of the film's three acting Oscar nominations. The cast, which, apart from the four leads, is mostly made up of unknowns and locals, works together as an ensemble nearly perfectly. Most striking are Christian Bale (The Dark Knight), whose energetic but troubled Dicky Eklund captures and carries the mood of the movie, and Melissa Leo (Frozen River), who gives the best guilt-tripping control-freak mother performance I've ever seen. Then there's Amy Adams (Doubt), the weak link—not because she acts poorly (she's actually quite good as the empowering girlfriend), but because her voice and face are a little too innocent for the f-bombs and punches she throws around in The Fighter. Wahlberg (The Departed), meanwhile, plays Micky with the power to let us know that he's the center of the story, but the quiet reserve to show us that the story isn't only about him. I say he was robbed of an Oscar nomination.

Director David O. Russell's (Three Kings) approach to the film is almost entirely based on authenticity, whether in the form of improvised scenes or having members of the Lowell community stand in for cameos or filming at the actual Lowell sites that have become part of the legend. It's a risky move, but Russell delivers with resounding success. It also helps that Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson wrote a great screenplay that's well-paced, natural, and builds up to its conclusion extremely well. The camerawork, which is meant to look somewhere between shaky and stable, serves the movie's style well, even if it's nothing extraordinary. However, in a great little touch, the HBO crew's cameras are actually early-'90s cameras donated to the film by HBO. David O. Russell isn't kidding around when it comes to authenticity.

I can't stress it enough: if you haven't already done so, go see this movie. The Fighter certainly isn't revolutionary in the world of filmmaking, and, I'll admit, the title is less than imaginative. But it's as close to perfection as a movie is going to get. It's the best movie I've seen from the 2010 pool—to say nothing of the Massachusetts pride that comes along with it.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.