‘The Iron Claw’ is a superlative depiction of pro wrestling’s saddest saga

Sean Durkin’s treatment of the Von Erich family story is rich with detail- and amid the tragedy, ends on a note of hope

There’s a scene early in The Iron Claw that illustrates just how often the world of professional wrestling brushes up against horrific tragedy. Kevin and David Von Erich wrestle a tag team match against Gino Hernandez and Bruiser Brody. Of those four men, three of them have been the subject of a Dark Side of the Ring episode that was specifically about the circumstances of their deaths. 

The Iron Claw, written and directed by Sean Durkin, tells the story of the Von Erich family, which has been called the first family of pro wrestling, and they resemble the Kennedys in several key ways, starting with a long series of tragedies that have been called a curse. I will mostly avoid spoilers for those who don’t know the story, except to say that there’s so much tragedy that the production opted to completely omit the life and death of a whole other Von Erich brother. 

The Von Erichs ruled the roost throughout the 1980s in World Class Championship Wrestling, a promotion based in Dallas, affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance (the NWA), and presided over by family patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), who pushes all of his sons into the family business. 

The three oldest sons are Kevin (Zac Efron), David (Harris Dickinson), and Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), all of whom show an aptitude for the business. This is not the case for Mike (Stanley Simons), the Fredo Corleone of the group, who would rather be a musician. 

We’re shown plenty of well-produced match action, albeit with a bit too much shaky cam for my liking, which accurately recaptures the period detail of a time when televised pro wrestling looked radically different from the polished product of today.

But the film’s behind-the-scenes material is even better. We see Fritz as an obsessed, uncaring father, while his wife Doris (Maura Tierney) mostly takes a backseat. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of drug abuse and horrific injuries, including the unbelievable fact that Kerry Von Erich lost his foot in a motorcycle accident, wrestling for many years with a prosthetic foot, and somehow managed to keep it a secret for the rest of his life.

The real Von Erich Curse, I would say, was their involvement in the high-injury, low-labor-protection world of pro wrestling itself. (The film has nothing to do with WWE itself, which has sought to establish a stronghold over wrestling history and myth-making, mostly through their practice of buying up the tape libraries of defunct competitors.)

In the film, the tragedies escalate throughout, although in the end, the film is about something else, something more poignant: The difficulty of breaking out of the cycle of tragedy and toxic parenthood. And that’s what brought the film into an extra gear, and made me call it one of the year’s best.

This is such a perfect idea- a prestige movie, from A24, about Southern indie wrestling. It’s a similar idea to what Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was, back in 2008, but Durkin executes it even more flawlessly. The attention to detail is exquisite- every championship belt is the exact right belt, and the haircuts are perfect. WWE veteran Chavo Guerrero, Jr., was the film’s wrestling consultant and also plays Ed “The Original Sheik” Farhat, who was the focus of the famed 1985 mockumentary I Like to Hurt People.

This film was made by people who know their wrestling history and nomenclature extremely well. This is good because online wrestling fans can be so pedantic that they make Marvel fanboys look like nothing.

And yes, the film acknowledges that wrestling is “fake,” while also noting that getting to win matches and eventually be champion is essentially a job promotion- and therefore very much sought after. 

The performances are wonderful across the board, with Efron doing the best work of his life as the tortured Kevin, and also getting absurdly jacked in the process (I remember Kevin Von Erich being a skinnier guy, but that might just be my memory). Dickinson, from Triangle of Sadness, is wonderful as David, who was the most charismatic of the brothers. And White, from the great Hulu series The Bear, once again plays a man pushing through while grieving a deceased brother. 

The Iron Claw explains just enough, when it comes to some of the background stuff, assuming that the people watching will know about the “territory system,” in which a national organization (the NWA) sends its champion to different parts of the country, and backroom politicking often determined who got to win the matches and carry the belt. The film, among other things, is set against the collapse of that system, as Vince McMahon’s then-WWF went national and began to overtake it.  

 There are things to quibble about. The omission of Chris Von Erich’s entire existence, while understandable for storytelling reasons, just feels egregious and disrespectful, especially when it comes to a particular choice at the film’s ending. One emotionally satisfying choice is sort of undercut once we realize that in real life, Kevin Von Erich’s oldest children are girls, not boys. The film also omits marriages and children by some of the brothers, while not doing much with the one wife we do see, played by Lily James. 

There’s some compression of time that feels like cheating. You’d think from the film Kerry’s motorcycle accident happened the night he won the NWA championship in 1983, and not three years later. Although I did enjoy the film’s use of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” which was Kerry’s entrance music for most of his career; he was even dubbed the “Modern Day Warrior.”

Maxwell Jacob Friedman, the AEW champion, appears in The Iron Claw as “Lance” Von Erich, a non-relative at one point dubbed the brothers’ cousin, although that subplot appears to have been cut for time, and MJF is barely in the film, despite serving as an executive producer. There’s also no mention of the Von Erichs, for some reason, being huge in Israel, which is especially ironic because Fritz got his start as a wrestler doing a Nazi villain gimmick.

I know this story very well. The early part was a bit before my time, but I remember the arc of Kerry Von Erich’s life especially well, and World Class was on nationally syndicated TV in the late 1980s, when I first started watching. My one byline in Pro Wrestling Illustrated, a magazine I loved as a kid, was a review of a documentary about the Von Erichs, Heroes of World Class.

That said, I can’t imagine what a gut punch it would be to watch this film and not know what’s coming.