Rourke back off the ropes

For years Mickey Rourke was down and out. Now, with The Wrestler, he is Hollywood's darling once more. But Joe Queenan, who stuck with him through the bad times, always knew he'd be back ...

A few weeks ago, I was cantering toward the marvellous Joan Miro exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when I heard one of the snooty, condescending senior citizens at the information desk ask her companion:

"Have you seen that new Mickey O'Rourke movie?" Her interlocutor, the classic Gotham culture vulture who has read every uplifting book and watched every heartbreaking film without seeming to have benefited from the experiences, replied: "Not yet. But it's on my list for the holidays."

Here in a nutshell was everything that is wrong with the wave of Mickey Rourke hysteria that began sweeping America after The Wrestler was released in December. One, it's Mickey Rourke, not Mickey O'Rourke, ladies.

Two, smartly dressed culture vultures don't belong at a wrestling movie; there's nothing in it for you; it isn't aimed at your demographic group.

And three, all of you Johnny-come-latelies now jumping on the Mickey Rourke bandwagon, where have you been all these years? Where were you when he sucked? Go on, fess up: how many of you saw Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man? Where were you when Mickey was scuffling for nickels and dimes in Masked and Anonymous? How many of you parvenus paid to see The Pledge, Wild Orchid, Get Carter, Domino, Desperate Hours, or Homeboy?

I did.

I raise these questions as someone who has viewed Mickey Rourke as a fixture in his life for the past 27 years, ever since Diner was released.

Spellbound, like so many other filmgoers, by Rourke's performance as the mischievous but charming Boogie, I watched in mounting dismay as his once-promising career stalled, then unravelled, then imploded. His weird, self-destructive behaviour - he briefly retired to take up prize-fighting; he was arrested for assaulting his wife, Carre Otis; he became obsessed with dogs; he started terrifying directors by bringing his own bodyguards to film sets - inspired a 1992 Movieline article entitled Mickey Rourke for a Day, in which I acted out scenes from the actor's life and films as varied as 91/2 Weeks, Wild Orchid, Barfly and A Prayer for the Dying. The article was turned into a film by Gary Johnstone that can be seen on the internet at any hour of day or night.

The premise of both the film and the article was that Rourke had miraculously abolished the distinction between his personal life and the repellent characters he played on screen, engendering a "cosmic Mickey Rourkeanism". To prepare for this admittedly demanding role, I stopped bathing for a week and started mistreating every woman who crossed my path.

In the TV film, I rolled around in the gutter, induced perfectly innocent women to swallow hot peppers, climbed into the ring and duked it out with a professional boxer, barged into editors' offices and threatened to punch out their lights, and just generally behaved like a dog.

The film ended up being a paean of sorts to the actor, a backhanded homage, as I was forced to admit that what at first seemed like a walk in the park was anything but. Sure, a determined journalist could keep up the abhorrent Mickey Rourke act for 24 hours or so. But Rourke had to do it every single day of his life. My hat was off to him.

For the next 13 years, I monitored Rourke's strange, perplexing career.

Most people I knew were unaware that he was still breathing, much less working. Not me. Whenever a Mickey Rourke movie got released, I saw it, no matter how bad, no matter how obscure. It was a hobby of mine, and one I enjoyed. It was like collecting Spandau Ballet bootlegs. Then, after Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler began drawing critical raves at film festivals in Europe and Canada last summer, I started to feel a certain proprietary resentment toward all the swine jumping on the Mickey Rourke bandwagon.

Yes, Mickey was back. But the cognoscenti and hipsters and Irony Girls huddling in the fashionably murky arthouse cinemas with screens the size of loincloths didn't even know where he was back from.

They didn't know about films like Animal Factory, Thicker Than Blood, They Crawl, or Shergar. They didn't know about Out in Fifty, Shades or the horrendous remake of Get Carter. And none of them knew that Mickey had once played St Francis of Assisi in a film entitled Francesco.

I did. I owned it.

The unvarnished truth is this: Mickey Rourke's overnight comeback is neither as surprising nor as precipitate as people would like to believe.

Yes, he is the prodigal son returning from the flesh pots, but while he was down there he was not merely cavorting. He was working, trying to get his career back on track.

In 1997, Francis Ford Coppola (who helped launch Rourke's career with the 1983 film Rumble Fish) gave him a small part in The Rainmaker. It was the first movie of any consequence that Rourke had made since Angel Heart in 1987 and reminded at least some people that beneath all that sociopathic behaviour lurked genuine talent. A year later, Vincent Gallo cast him as a vengeful bookie in Buffalo 66, a low-budget cult film that Gallo himself wrote, directed, scored and starred in.

That was a generous and courageous act on the part of the twitchy, undernourished Gallo, because in the 150 seconds or so that he was on screen, Rourke took the entire cast of Buffalo 66 to the woodshed and schooled them. Just as Satan could never seduce us if he were not in some way seductive, Mickey Rourke never could have mounted a comeback unless he had once been in a place to come back to. Long dismissed as a punchline, a clown, a pariah, Rourke demonstrated in that microscopic sliver of Buffalo 66 that he had chops Vincent Gallo and Christina Ricci could only dream of having.

They're still dreaming.

For the next 10 years, Rourke laboriously worked his way back into Hollywood's consciousness, if not the public's. He made a lot of bad movies, but he also made a few good ones. Once Upon a Time in Mexico was a typically self-indulgent Robert Rodriguez mess, but it did have its moments. Sin City was even more of a self-indulgent Robert Rodriguez mess, but it had even more moments.

Man On Fire, in which Rourke played a corrupt Mexico City lawyer, was a solid action film, and Domino, in which he played an affable bail bondsman opposite Keira Knightley, was not without its subtle delights.

Today, there is a suggestion afoot that director Darren Aronofsky tracked down the actor in a cave or a homeless shelter and personally lifted him out of the slime to cast him in The Wrestler. But this is not true. Rourke has been working steadily, admittedly in obscurity, for years. He wasn't simply handed his chance for a comeback. In a roundabout way, he earned it. And when the opportunity arose, he seized it. He answered the bell.

What's more, The Wrestler would not be much of a film without Mickey Rourke. Written by Robert Siegel, formerly an editor at the satirical newspaper The Onion, The Wrestler is essentially Rocky in Tights, a Cuisinart collection of hoary cliches that have been seen in films as varied as Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Wild Bunch, Fat City, Raging Bull, and not one but six Sylvester Stallone films. The washed-up jock trying to win the affection of his child has been a Hollywood standby since King Vidor made The Champ in 1931. Nor is this the first time we have seen the stripper with the heart of gold (Marisa Tomei; if you're pushing 40 from the wrong side and trying to scare up an Academy award nomination, this is where you go). At various junctures, most particularly when a gimpy, bespectacled wrestler assaults Rourke's character with a staple gun, the film verges on farce.

What saves The Wrestler is that it is a film with a heart, and the heart is Mickey Rourke's. The Wrestler recounts the saga of Robin Ramzinski, a burned-out 50-something who was once one of the top draws in the professional wrestling circuit, but is now a has-been living in a North Jersey trailer park.

Busted up and broken down, "the Ram" is trying to pull his personal life back together as his career winds towards its end. This in itself is a bittersweet set-up, since professional wrestling is viewed by the general public as a white-trash sham; in effect, the Ram is trying to recapture the glory of a profession that has no claim to true glory.

But while it is true that wrestling is staged and choreographed and phony, the stunts themselves are dangerous, and people do get hurt in the ring, just like acrobats and lion tamers and circus clowns. The violence may be simulated, but the pain of simulating violence is real. None of this will make any sense to people who work at the information desk at the Museum of Modern Art.

Rourke, for the first time in decades, radiates the sweetness and innocence that he first displayed in Diner, the film that made him famous.