Michael Peterson, renamed Charles Bronson by his bare-knuckle boxing manager, is “Britain’s most violent prisoner”. He bungled a robbery of a post-office in 1974 at the age of 22, took twenty-odd pounds, and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He managed to stretch that term to life in confinement (having spent over 30 years in solitary) through a series of offences including assault, criminal damage, kidnapping, blackmail and climbing up on the roof of Broadmoor prison and lighting it on fire.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s biopic stars Tom Hardy as the titular Bronson, a shaven-headed mustachioed dynamo, tense and stalking in circles inside cells. The film cuts between jarring, startling theatrical monologues in which Bronson directly relays his history, his desire to be famous and infamous and scenes from the man’s grim, terrifying and hilarious journey through seemingly every prison cell and mental hospital in England. It’s a showcase for a spectacular performance, Tom Hardy’s, and he is allowed to express the full range of Bronson’s very real idiosyncrasy – he is by turns menacing and engaging, capable of hair-trigger violence but never without seeming cause and never on terms favouring him. He doesn’t fight a guard caught alone in a cell, he strips naked and greases himself and fights the four that enter to save their comrade. And loses. Again and again. Hardy absolutely seizes the role and invents from a unique subject an utterly unique, completely believable character and masters him in voice, poise and gesture, a breathtaking, technical performance.

Had he been in a film made by a director more concerned with commercial appeal, it’d be the “buzz” performance of the year, but had that been true it would also be true that the performance itself couldn’t have been as strong. Refn constructs a film whose every frame supports its central character’s refusal to ascribe meaning or choice or reason to any of his actions. It’s mannered and considered and as reminiscent of Kubrick’s composition and sets as Bronson’s call for music in exchange for a painted hostage is of Alex’s love of ultraviolence and Beethoven in that director’s A Clockwork Orange.

In making such a film, though, one in which a character whose strength and smirking power obliterates the chance or hope or possibility of there being a solution or a cause or an avoidable mistake having been made and noted, Refn has made a film that’s curiously cold. We marvel at Hardy’s Bronson but the relationship he builds with us and with the audience for whom he performs his vaudeville routines is one of love and admiration but completely bereft of empathy or concern. As Bronson tosses himself at the feet of angry guard after angry guard caring not at all about what happens to him or them, our awe neuters our ability to feel concern and to worry at all about what will happen to the man. Like the film, the man is impressive, colossal and utterly unmoving.

8/10