When it comes to professional wrestling I can’t distinguish a piledriver from a flying elbow drop. So, please, pardon my obliviousness when I came to see Sean Durkin’s fact-based sports saga about the Texas wrestling dynasty the Von Erichs starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White. I anticipated an action-driven sports feature. Entertaining, sweaty and triumphant, or tinged by the agony of defeat and the power of athletic resurrection.
What I didn’t expect was a male weepie.
Like one of the champs in that genre, “Field of Dreams,” “The Iron Claw” squeezes wrestling’s agony, ecstasy and Americanness for all its Gatorade, alongside exploring the fraught bonds of fathers and sons.