Tom Hardy, recently a spindly gangster in a whatever Guy Ritchie film, is now a jolly volcano of rage: Bronson, a bizarre and mighty prison film in which he stars, is the kind of acting opportunity that transforms bodies and, let’s hope, careers. (If you remember Eric Bana’s menacing turn in Chopper before he became a Hollywood puppy, you’re in the right cell block.) The tale of Bronson is a real-life one: that of Michael Gordon Peterson, who, despite being raised by “decent, upstanding members of society”—as we hear in Hardy’s narration—found himself unsuccessfully robbing a British post office in 1974. Little did he know that this incident would set him on his real cracked purpose, as a riot-starting career prisoner, still incarcerated after 35 years.

Danish daredevil auteur Nicolas Winding Refn has taken massive liberties with the facts, adding humanizing details like a marriage proposal during a brief spell of exoneration—but who cares? Swaddled in Kubrickian cheek and some hilariously ostentatious classical-music cues, the movie is a stylish, aggressively arty joke, toggling between Hardy’s vaudeville fantasy life and an only slightly more realistic series of prison vignettes. Unassumingly, Refn steers the movie toward a Clockwork Orange–like indictment of lefty correctionalism; even a sympathetic prison art teacher becomes a target of “Charlie Bronson’s” violence. The guy simply knows no other way of being. Stiffly escorted in a suit by his parents during one temporary release, our hero becomes a nearly tragic figure of stunted growth. (New Order’s sublime “Your Silent Face” helps immeasurably.) Refn has somehow found his way to an authentic English hard-man drama, anchored in a dynamite performance, even as it celebrates thug life.—Joshua Rothkopf

Opens Fri; Angelika. Find showtimes

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See also Prison baroque

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