The Smashing Machine

The Smashing Machine, directed by Benny Safdie, is not just a sports biopic. It is a bruised and quietly devastating portrait of ambition, fragility, and the long shadow cast by physical glory. The film follows mixed martial arts pioneer Mark Kerr, played with surprising restraint and sincerity by Dwayne Johnson, in what is arguably the most daring and human performance of his career. It chronicles Mark Kerr's rise in the late 1990s as an indomitable fighter and his slow collapse under the weight of painkillers, fame, and the impossible demand to always win, both in and out of the ring. The irony of seeing Dwayne Johnson, a man who built his persona on invincibility, portray a fighter who ultimately learns to lose, gives the film an added metaphorical dimension.

Benny Safdie presents his story less as a chronicle of sporting triumphs than as an anatomy of collapse. Drawing inspiration from the documentary of the same name made by John Hyams for HBO in 2002, he uses the grainy images filmed by hand by cinematographer Maceo Bishop to blur the line between fiction and reality. The camera circles Mark Kerr, almost shyly, in the locker room, at home, or slumped in silence after a defeat. It is a film about noise and silence, about a man who spends his days in cages but has no safe haven to retreat to. Benny Safdie resists the traditional arc of redemption; instead, he offers the unsettling calm that follows the storm, the “what now?” of a man who has conquered everything only to realize that he is empty.

In Dwayne Johnson, Benny Safdie finds an actor willing to burn his own mythology. Gone are the dazzling smile and invulnerable charisma that marked his years of success. Under the prosthetics designed by Kazu Hiro, Dwayne Johnson is unrecognizable, not because of the makeup, but because of his vulnerability. His Mark Kerr is a paradox: an imposing figure capable of unspeakable violence who speaks in a soft, cautious voice, like a child seeking approval. His addiction to opiates is not presented as a moral failure, but as a tragic attempt to stifle the chaos within him. When he confesses, “A day without pain is like a day without sunshine,” it's not bravado, it's a confession. The film understands addiction as both physical and existential, an extension of the same thirst that drives all fighters: the need to feel something that hurts just enough to remind you that you're alive.

Opposite him, Emily Blunt delivers one of her most spontaneous performances as Dawn Staples, Mark Kerr's unstable girlfriend and emotional sparring partner. She oscillates between tenderness and fury, her presence both a salvation and a poison. The scenes between them, particularly a heated confrontation set to Bruce Springsteen's “Jungleland,” are more violent than any cage fight. Benny Safdie refuses to reduce Dawn to the cliché of the nagging partner; she is demanding, manipulative, and sometimes cruel, but her chaos mirrors Kerr's. The two are locked in a kind of tragic choreography where love and destruction are inseparable. Their toxicity feels familiar, less an invention of the screenwriter than a portrait of people who can't help but hurt each other in the name of devotion.

The film's most surprising thread, however, is the discreet bond between Kerr and his friend and fellow fighter Mark Coleman, played with natural authenticity by Ryan Bader, himself an MMA champion in real life. Their camaraderie brings emotional balance to the film. Thanks to Bader's unostentatious naturalness, we discover the rare tenderness that exists between men trained to break bones for a living. When Coleman quietly confronts Kerr about his drug use, Johnson's performance breaks down into tears that seem deserved, almost accidental. Benny Safdie captures these moments without judgment or sentimentality—just two men sitting under fluorescent lights, too exhausted to lie to each other anymore.

What makes The Smashing Machine memorable is Benny Safdie's refusal to dramatize violence. The fights are not choreographed for excitement, but observed with distance, often filmed from outside the ring, fragmented by the ropes or cut before the adrenaline reaches its peak. The audience becomes less of a spectator and more of a voyeur, observing the degradation of human endurance in real time. Benny Safdie's decision to pair these brutal images with a soundtrack that alternates between Nala Sinephro's jazz interludes and Elvis Presley's melancholic rendition of “My Way” transforms the film into something more akin to a requiem than a spectacle. This is not a film about victory, but about the slow disintegration of the will to win.

There is also a poetic irony in the way Johnson, once synonymous with Hollywood's most indestructible heroes, uses this role to expose the fragility behind his own legend. It's as if the actor himself is struggling with his public image: The Rock learns to break down, the superstar dares to show his flaws. His performance here is reminiscent of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler or even Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, while remaining unique: stripped of all artifice, trembling with honesty. In an unforgettable scene, after a devastating defeat, Kerr sits alone in the locker room, breathless, his face relaxed with disbelief. For nearly a minute, the camera doesn't move. Neither does he. The silence is deafening, the kind of silence that ends careers or launches new ones.

Benny Safdie's direction, while more measured than his previous collaborations with his brother, retains their shared fascination with obsession and collapse. But here, chaos gives way to melancholy. The texture of the film—its sun-bleached Arizona houses, its smoke-filled Japanese arenas, the hiss of duct tape wrapped around swollen wrists—evokes a kind of elegy for the working-class gladiator. There are no heroes or villains, just people trying to survive their own bodies. Even the violence seems strangely compassionate, as if the only real language of the fighters is pain. In this sense, the title seems ironic: Kerr is not the machine; he is what remains after the machine has stopped working.

By the time The Smashing Machine reaches its sober conclusion, the idea of triumph seems irrelevant. What lingers instead is exhaustion—the feeling of a man who has finally stopped fighting the world long enough to confront himself. It's an ending that resists catharsis but radiates humanity. For Dwayne Johnson, it's a rebirth, the kind of career-defining role that wipes away years of Hollywood glamour to reveal something raw and authentic. For Benny Safdie, it's proof that intensity can coexist with grace. The result is one of the most surprising and deeply understated sports dramas of recent years, a film that is less about crushing opponents than about rebuilding what remains of oneself when the cheers die down.

The Smashing Machine
Written and directed by Benny Safdie
Produced by Benny Safdie, Dwayne Johnson, Eli Bush, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, David Koplan
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Oleksandr Usyk
Cinematography: Maceo Bishop
Edited by Benny Safdie
Music by Nala Sinephro
Production companies: A24, Out for the Count, Seven Bucks Productions, Magnetic Fields Entertainment
Distributed by A24 (United States), Zinc (France)
Release dates: September 1, 2025 (Venice), October 3, 2025 (United States), October 29,2025 (France)
Running time: 123 minutes

Seen on October 31, 2025 at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 16, seat A18

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