Bronson, the new biopic about Charlie Bronson, “Britain’s most famous prisoner,” begins, more or less, with its hero naked, filthy, snarling, and stuck in a cage. It ends — and I don’t think I’m giving much away here — with its hero naked, filthy, snarling, and stuck in an even smaller cage.

This is not much of a character arc. But then Tom Hardy, who plays Bronson, and Nicholas Winding Refn, the film’s director, didn’t have too much else to work with. The real Charlie Bronson has shuttled among more than 120 different prisons and mental wards over the last 35 years, taking hostages, inciting riots, and attacking countless guards along the way.

Bronson, the movie, actually covers only a small slice of this hell-raising résumé — but we get the idea, and the images become familiar: Bronson, hulking and mustachioed, greasing himself up for a fight; Bronson strangling some prison weirdo; Bronson lunging at a crowd of guards; Bronson being carried away by that same crowd of guards. I found it a little repetitive after an hour and a half — I can’t imagine how the real Charlie Bronson has kept it up into his fourth decade.

But then, that is sort of the point. Charlie Bronson, we are told in the opening sequence, had always wanted to be famous, and prison mayhem was his way of getting there. He changes his name, abandoning the more mundane Michael Gordon Peterson in homage to the Death Wish star, and pursues his chosen vocation with the single-minded focus of a Real World cast member.

You’ve got to admire his persistence, and his flair. Nicholas Winding Refn clearly does, and has been quoted in the press talking some claptrap about violence as performance art. All I can say about that is, that’s an easy comparison to toss off if you’re not the one being punched in the face. We’re reminded along the way that Bronson has never actually killed anyone. It’s worth keeping in mind, sure. But 35-plus years of beating people up is plenty of legacy in itself.

As it happens, I watched Bronson back-to-back with Tyson, James Toback’s documentary from earlier this year about the former heavyweight champ. This was at the suggestion of a 30 Ninjas editor who thought there might be some parallels, and he was on to something: The real Mike Tyson and the fictionalized Charlie Bronson each narrate their own stories. Both are big and bald. Both are what you might call inarticulately articulate. Bronson doesn’t have a face tattoo, granted, but his mustache is a sight to behold.

And, of course, there’s the fact that they’ve both made lives for themselves with their fists. Both are virtuosically at home amid chaos, and ploddingly out of place everywhere else.

But there are big differences between the two films, tonal and otherwise. Tyson is way more violent, for one thing, and though it’s the legalized violence of the boxing ring, Toback presents it, often in slow motion, in all its brutality. Bronson, fight fans might be disappointed to discover, doesn’t actually have much fighting in it. Bronson staring menacingly and laughing maniacally — check and check, often in quick succession. But the fights themselves, not so much.

The other difference is that Bronson is fun. I’m still not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It’s about a real guy whose real life, we have to imagine, has turned out unhappily. But sure enough, I found myself rooting for him along the way. Not necessarily to get out of prison again — oh God, no — but at least to get some excitement during his time inside. Watching Tyson, you’re sick of him by the end — sick of his excuses, sick of his musings about how complex he is, all evidence to the contrary. Even Iron Mike himself is tired by the time he gets his ass kicked, late in the film, by some pasty Irish tomato can and confesses that his love of boxing is gone.

With Bronson, that moment of clarity never comes. You can criticize James Toback, justifiably, for indulging Tyson’s whiny self-righteousness, but in the end he shows you the consequences of the fighter’s crazy life. In Bronson, it’s not exactly that you don’t see consequences — Bronson is, after all, locked up, and doesn’t seem to be getting out anytime soon. But any anguish or even inner conflict that he may feel over his choices — that’s what we don’t see.

And so the movie is less nuanced, for better and worse. It’s certainly more of a rollicking good time, staying comfortably away from big moral questions.

On the one hand, that directorial decision — and the absence of a “why” in the narrative — make Bronson feel a bit hollow. But then, maybe in some stories nuance is out of place. What I wanted most, all throughout Tyson, was for someone to interrupt the champ’s rambling and remind him of some things he should have learned in kindergarten: Don’t bite. Don’t hit girls. That he didn’t learn those things during his out-of-control childhood truly is, as he would have it, a failure of society. But maybe what makes Charlie Bronson appealing, in movie form anyway, is the purity of his actions, back story be damned. He lets his punches speak for themselves.

Throughout the movie, music supervisor Lol Hammond (and what a great Internet-era name that is) sets brutal fistfights to opera from Puccini, Wagner, Verdi and Strauss. The director, Refn, has said that this was a way of undercutting the film’s overt masculinity with moments of the feminine. Leaving aside what a guy like Wagner would have thought of that characterization, it is a cool touch.

But the funniest musical moment, for my money, may also come closest to a statement of purpose. It comes midway through the film, as a heavily sedated Bronson is locked up in a mental hospital with no apparent hope of escape. At a rec-room dance party, the other crazies are whirling about to the thumping electronic beat of the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin.” As Bronson wanders around in his medicated daze, we hear the opening words to the song:

“When I look back upon my life
It’s always with a sense of shame
I’ve always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
No matter when or where or who
Has one thing in common, too
It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin
It’s a sin.”

And maybe that’s all there is to say after all.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Gypsy Piss: The Old Men Fight
• Pump You Up! How the Stars of Bronson and Other Flicks Got Ripped for Their Action Close-Ups
• Five Deadly Venoms: A New York Asian Film Festival Review
• Ip Man — Winner Best Film/Best Action Choreography Hong Kong Film Awards
• Channing Tatum Is a Stripper Again
• The Mystery That Is Tyson – Tyson Trailer