Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

With a shaved head, magnificent moustache, and blood-curdling bellow, Tom Hardy’s Michael Peterson stands alone on a bare stage hurling invective at the audience. He’s a tabloid superstar and Britain’s most notoriously violent inmate, a bare-knuckled bruiser who spent 30 of his 34 years behind bars in solitary confinement––despite the odd footnote that his actual crimes in the outside world never really amounted to anything all that serious. But Peterson––who pointedly changed his name to Charles Bronson, in honor of the DEATH WISH star––isn’t about to get any time off for good behavior. He pathologically cannot stop pounding on prison guards, stripping naked, howling, and taking on futile battles he’s destined to lose.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s vivid, expressionistic true-crime tale parts ways with your typical, grimy prison film, instead providing a hallucinatory tour of Bronson’s twisted psyche. It’s all searing colors and Brechtian distancing devices, accompanied by deafening blasts of Wagner and the Pet Shop Boys. Hardy’s performance is mesmerizing in its ferocity; you can feel the cult-hero status brewing around him as you watch. But once Peterson/Bronson falls under the spell of a sympathetic art instructor, Refn makes an unexpected case for self-actualization through extremity. Daring to portray the protagonist’s penchant for mayhem as its own creative impulse, BRONSON’s indelible finale merges creation with destruction.

- Vincent Archer