Rourke and Tomei are heartbreaking in ‘Wrestler’

By RAFER GUZMAN

Neither is afraid to bare body and soul.

You’ve rarely seen a human so hideous, and so endearing, as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the character played — make that incarnated — by Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.”

His closest cinematic cousin might be John Merrick, the disfigured, childlike carny in “The Elephant Man.” But where John Hurt played that role cloaked in prosthetics, Rourke simply presents his gnarled face and body to the camera, which lingers at first with cruel fascination, then with pity and finally love.

A peroxided Adonis of professional wrestling during the hair-metal 1980s, Randy is now just another hulking palooka, sniffling through the New Jersey winter and struggling to pay the rent on his decrepit trailer.

By day, he works in a supermarket stockroom, but by night, he’s still The Ram, albeit in penny-ante matches against other no-names.

For company, he visits a strip club and dotes on Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), another performer whose body is giving out ahead of her spirit.

He’s also trying to woo an even tougher customer, his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood, effective but overwrought).

Director Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream”) focuses more on details than story to bring “The Wrestler” to life.

In the ring, the choreography may be fake but the blood isn’t: Randy rolls in glass and slices his forehead with a razor, all to please the crowd.

Back in the dressing room, he looks like one of those weeping carcasses Rocky used to pummel, but it’s his buoyant spirit that earns our empathy.

Rourke has earned an Oscar nomination for the role, and so has Tomei. At 44, she may be the first serious actress to play a stripper who actually bares her body and assumes the humiliating poses required. Rourke is harrowing; Tomei is devastating.