‘The Iron Claw’ Review: Zac Efron, Pumped and Inspired, Leads an Absorbing True-Life Drama About a Pro-Wrestling Dynasty

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Gladiators, pain freaks, brutes, clowns, true athletes, fake competitors: The slab-of-meat stars of professional wrestling are all those things.

And back in the 1980s, when wrestling was reaching its cultural zenith, it almost looked as if you could divide the world between those who took wrestling on the level and those who dismissed it as a vulgar, over-the-top bad joke.

Yet it was never that simple. Even if you saw through the put-on nature of wrestling, you could still get off on the theater of it as cartoon spectacle.

And a great many hard-core wrestling fans were actually in on the joke. They knew, on some level, that they were watching staged antics, yet that didn’t keep them from experiencing it all as “real.” If you’re wondering how that kind of cognitive dissonance works, welcome to the America that pro wrestling helped to usher in — an America in which Donald Trump, who used pro wrestling to boost his own celebrity, could build his presidential aspirations on fakery and still be “believed” by people who don’t care that he’s fooling them.