Manodrome

Manodrome seems designed as a rebuttal to the idea that Jesse Eisenberg can only play nebbish dorks. True, he brings an underlying insecurity to poor, lost Ralphie, but he's a gym rat, working on his strength training and posing for selfies in the locker room mirror. He's the kind of guy that would bristle at a spotter, and he's constantly on edge, ready to throw a punch or at least call someone out for a perceived insult. Cinematographer Wyatt Garfield (Beatriz at Dinner) frames him as looming and broad, brushing under door lintels and barely scraping through the jambs.

But he's also dumb, and that definitely feels new for Eisenberg, an actor of refined intellect who has previously specialized in geniuses with blind spots (Mark Zuckerberg, Lex Luthor, and author David Lipsky in The End of the Tour). Here he's a working0class stiff who's fallen on hard times, working rideshare gigs to support himself and his pregnant girlfriend, Sal (Young), for whom he's starting to harbor festering resentment about her whingeing about having a job: and that's before even touching on his broken childhood as a pudgy little ginger, or seething homophobia with a trace of self-hatred – a trait exposed by his obsession with fellow bodybuilder Ahmet (Sesay). All that adds up to making it all too plausible that he would fall under the spell of Dad Dan (Brody), a quietly charismatic leader of an all-male support group operating out of a wood-paneled mansion house in upstate New York. Suddenly, the lumbering Ralphie is cowed, hunched, and getting his brain filled with psychobabble self-improvement aphorisms by Dad Dan, all softly chorused by all the other directionless dorks who have fallen under his cultlike spell.

Eisenberg is always at his most intriguing when he's denied the use of that nimble tongue and forced into silences, such as in Kelly Reichardt's monkey-wrenching drama Night Moves, or his underseen reinvigoration of mime legend Marcel Marceau, Resistance. It's therefore fortunate for writer/director Trengove (The Wound) that he has Eisenberg to fill in the gaps on his script, which always feels a little tentative in what aspires to be an indictment of all these asinine men's rights groups, who emotionally coddle their members more than the global gynocentric conspiracy they imagine ever could.

It's Eisenberg who finds Ralphie in those narrative spaces, creating a whole and crushingly convincing portrait of a profoundly lost man, and the damage left in his wake. In doing so what he really rebuts is every charlatan trying to exploit such broken brains.