Review: 'The Smashing Machine'

Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine —premiering here at the Venice Film Festival —is satisfying as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. Safdie, who also wrote the script, tells the story of how real-life mixed-martial artist, UFC champion, and all-around bruiser Mark Kerr won worldwide fame, tumbled down a rabbit hole of opioid addiction, and clawed his way back to sanity and success. And that’s about it: Safdie doesn’t tie the story into excessively dramatic pretzel knots, and he doesn’t try to apply any Rocky -style narrative formulas, as effective as those formulas can be. Instead, he simply trusts his star, Dwayne Johnson , to lead us through Kerr’s story of escalating fame, addiction, and recovery, without resorting to the clichés of so many addiction-recovery dr