'The Iron Claw' Doesn’t Quite Take Hold

Given a long enough timeline, everybody of note winds up redeemed. So it goes with Texas’ star-crossed Von Erich family of wrestlers, which serves as the “inspiration” for director Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a gorgeously-shot film that aims for epic sweep across its 140-minute runtime. Durkin nails the sweep part — decades of history and one whole brother, the most unfortunate of the five who crossed the rainbow bridges, are swept under the rug. The result is hard to figure: unlike Darren Aronofsky’s gritty but fantastical The Wrestler, which turned Mickey Rourke’s beaten-down Randy the Ram into a figure of mythic scope, The Iron Claw instead serves up a drama that is neither real nor fake, true nor false, fish nor fowl. If pressed to provide a blurb, I suppose I would say, “It’s interesting,” but interesting to whom?

You see, as a historian who once staged a photo exhibit related to the Von Erichs’ considerable impact on Dallas athletics — a 2015 event that convinced me that the people of that region, at least, still loved the family — I kept wondering how Durkin envisioned the audience for his film. Serious wrestling fans, who grew up on Von Erich exposes by the likes of Irv Muchnick and Dave Meltzer, already knew the nitty-gritty: father Fritz, once a hated German-style bad guy, fails to get his run with the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship (referred to as the “World Heavyweight Championship” in the film), buys the Dallas wrestling territory, sires a passel of sons — three of whom (Kevin, Kerry, and David) become serious contenders for the title that eluded the old man — only to wind up losing the wrestling territory and being predeceased by five of those six sons. The story is beyond tragic, something Durkin conceded when he omitted diminutive Chris’ story from the narrative: the oldest brother Jack died in a lightning strike at age 6, true superstar David died of either acute enteritis (the Von Erich’s contention and the movie’s approach) or a drug overdose in 1984 (Ric Flair has claimed Bruiser Brody, a long-time wrestler for Fritz, immediately disposed of the drugs while they were on their Japanese tour), and then Mike, Chris, and Kerry (the only actual NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion in the family, albeit a short-lived one) died via suicide, in 1987, 1991, and 1993, respectively.

Even slightly less serious wrestling fans know the narrative: the excellent indie documentary Heroes of World Class — many orders of magnitude better than anything else on the topic — covered this among other subjects related to the collapse of Fritz’s company, and a subsequent WWE documentary, The Triumph and Tragedy of World Class Championship Wrestling, retread much of that ground, albeit more gently because this was tied to the 2009 induction of the Von Erich family into the WWE Hall of Fame (and the related acquisition of old WCCW footage, useful filler for launching the WWE Network a few years later). VICE’s Dark Side of the Ring series, which usually does at least a serviceable job of examining wrestling’s lurid past, produced a solid 2019 episode about surviving brother Kevin Von Erich — here played to good effect by a beefed-up Zac Efron, who looks almost as good as Kevin did, at least from the waist up — and his recollections of the family’s demise.

In that documentary, as now, Kevin placed the blame for the family’s misfortune on the very real drug abuse that was rampant in the wrestling industry in the 1980s, not the supposed “toxic masculinity” of father Fritz. This is not the path Sean Durkin takes, given that he shows scattered small amounts of drugs and limited drug use in only a handful of scenes (a single vial of steroids stands in for thousands of others when it’s placed on a bench next to the brothers). Instead, the excellent actor Holt McCallany deploys his mastery of Fritz’s stooped, intimidating presence in the service of a win-at-all-costs, “if you’re not first, you’re last” paterfamilias. It is the grip of an obsessed Fritz’s “iron claw” — the family’s signature move, the one daddy made famous — that is presented to viewers as the cause of his family’s demise, underscored in the bizarre denouement of the film: Kerry, unable to get over in the WWF after a brief push due to the limitations of a foot lost in a motorcycle accident, returns to the Von Erich farm and kills himself; Kevin and Fritz are both there, amazingly, and begin grappling (this was 1993; Fritz would have been 64), whereupon Kevin mounts his old man and starts, fittingly enough, to squeeze the life out of him. It is a simple enough dramatic beat, but it’s also incredibly precious and uncomplicated. Such a climax is necessary because the Von Erich story was a mess; you’d need an entire prestige TV series to tell it in the detail it deserved, and even then you couldn’t get it right, because it would be so pitch-black bleak that no one could possibly stomach it, as Durkin himself acknowledged in cutting Chris (despite the fact that Chris’ own handgun suicide foreshadows Kerry’s).

By way of full disclosure: Kevin Von Erich assisted me with the photo exhibit I mentioned earlier. And when I say “assisted,” I mean he wrote back within minutes of being contacted with lengthy backstories regarding the photos of him and Kerry contained in the collection — because he’d never seen them before. This meant something, he noted, because he had seen almost every wrestling-magazine photo that circulated of him and his brothers, whom he remembered fondly. These happy recollections of wrestling at places like the Dallas Sportatorium and the Will Rogers Center in Fort Worth — and the images themselves — are faithfully recreated by Sean Durkin. The fraternal vibe is something Durkin grapples with and conveys successfully, and his staging of a series of 1980s wrestling matches is largely true to the aesthetic of the era, even if genuine purists and obsessives might quibble with the casting of a very decrepit Kevin Anton as badass Harley Race (he nailed Race’s promo, to be sure) and Aaron Dean Eisenberg as Ric Flair (there is simply no way to accurately capture the Nature Boy’s mannerisms outside of using Black wrestler Jay Lethal, who does a spot-on impression, so actors are well-served to simply do whatever they think is true to Flair’s spirit). Efron excels at conveying how Kevin’s tongue-tied mic work cost him big money in the long run, Maura Tierney is good as always in a difficult role as Fritz’s wife Doris, Stanley Simons does yeoman’s work as a troubled Mike Von Erich meant to serve as a sort of composite Mike/Chris character, and Harris Dickinson is spot-on as David Von Erich. Only Jeremy Allen White, who delivers his lines as capably as any, finds himself hopelessly miscast — he’s simply too small to play Kerry Von Erich, the family’s greatest physical presence and possessor of arguably the best physique in 1980s wrestling. I’d usually refrain from such quibbles, but for anyone who knows the story, the difference is so glaring it distracts the viewer in nearly every scene occupied by Kerry.

So again I ask: for whom was this movie made? Wrestling fans, from what I can tell, are divided, with some laying into all the inaccuracies but most liking it — either because former AEW world champion Maxwell Jacob Friedman has an executive producer credit on it and briefly appears in it or because they’re happy to see any wrestling presented on the screen, especially in a film that has artistic pretensions. “See? This content I consume is serious,” the true fan can tell his significant other as they wriggle in their seat around the one-hour mark, eager to micturate and struggling to follow a plot that rushes by them.

How, I wonder, did casual wrestling fans, or mere movie-goers, react to the way Durkin presented this plot? Crucial events, like Kerry’s NWA Worlds Heavyweight Championship victory and motorcycle accident, play out in an almost hallucinatory way (though the money shot of Kerry’s leg stump is fairly effective, I’ll admit), time is alternately dilated and compressed, and exposition is provided intermittently, if at all (though most dialogue still involves telling, not showing, given how much has to be unpacked). This is characteristic of a lot of A24’s output, but I don’t think many came to the theater expecting something as bewildering as David Lowery’s oneiric The Green Knight, which I had the misfortune to sleep through twice in 2021.

As a historian with a fairly dim view of historical fiction — per my own screwy sense of aesthetics, I want something like Peter Watkins’ documentary-style, slow-as-molasses Edvard Munch or La Commune or nothing at all — I am surely not in the target demographic for offerings like this. That said, I am glad this movie exists, warts and all. For one thing, it has given Kevin Von Erich and sons Ross and Marshall — seen as young kiddos within the film — some TNT exposure on AEW, during which a wider audience could see that the next generation of Von Erichs have been competent workers for a fairly long time. It may also prompt some people to dig deeper into the family’s lore, as I once spent an entire half-year doing, because the ugly truth of their tragedy is far stranger than this streamlined, lighter-than-air fiction can possibly convey.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.