Movie Review

★★★

BLEED FOR THIS

Directed by Ben Younger. Written by Younger, Pippa Bianco, and Angelo Pizzo. Starring Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Ciarán Hinds. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs. 116 minutes. R (language, sexuality/nudity, some accident images, men pounding each other into hamburger for your entertainment).

‘Bleed for This’’ is awfully close to the Platonic ideal of a boxing movie — which is not the same as saying the best.

The film’s fine, better than OK. Like its subject, Cranston, R.I.’s Vinny Pazienza, who progressed from lightweight to super middleweight over the course of his career, this biopic by Ben Younger (“Boiler Room’’) gathers strength and power as it goes. By the end, you know you’ve seen something but, lord, do you have to jump over the genre conventions on the way.

Younger’s script, based on a story by Pippa Bianco and Angelo Pizzo, takes certain liberties with the facts, but this is the way they tell it: Vinny (Miles Teller), a.k.a. Vinny Paz, a.k.a. The Pazmanian Devil, is a brash young brawler who, after a bad 1988 beating, is told by Providence fight promoters (Ted Levine and Jordan Gelber, oozing bad karma and worse hair) that it’s over, kid, hang it up.

Instead, Vinny partners with Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), a trainer who worked with Mike Tyson before the bottle got the best of Rooney. Also on hand are Vinny’s sports-noodge father, Angelo, played by Ciarán Hinds as a gaping maw with gold chains, Vinny’s sainted mother, Louise (Katey Sagal, surrounded by devotional candles), and Vinny’s sister Doreen (Amanda Clayton), who’s the most levelheaded person in the movie.

The real story of Vinny Pazienza, of course, is his return from a 1991 car crash that broke his neck, cited as one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the sport. The film dramatizes every grueling, inspirational step, from the accident to the months in a medical “halo’’ to Pazienza stepping into a ring where everyone’s afraid to hit him. Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash’’ seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and “Bleed for This’’ earns your respect for him.

That it does so by playing fast and loose with the chronology is a disappointing concession to movies, I guess, and the need to shape them better than life does. For the record, the film’s climactic fight against Roberto Duran at the MGM Grand was not Pazienza’s first bout since his accident but his seventh over two years of comeback.

On its own terms, the movie gets you rooting — well-chosen tunes by Willis Earl Beal and scorer Julia Holter help — and it’s good to see a different part of Greater New England than South Boston get the dowdy, run-down Hollywood treatment. “Bleed for This’’ lays on the Italian working-class “authenticity’’ with a spackle knife, and the hair and accessories departments should probably get combat pay. The accents? Not bad. The attitude? Appropriately in your face. Vinny is taunted at a weigh-in when his opponent tells him to “get back to Boston’’ and his father leaps up like an angry puffer fish, “Hey, hey, hey — we’re from Prah-vidence!’’

Still, you don’t get a regional vibe so much as a broadly ethnic one, and missing from the film is the rock-star level of mania that Pazienza sparked among Rhode Islanders of the period. It’s an outside job.

Eckhart as the coach is the film’s stealth champ. We haven’t seen the actor in this sort of character part before; he’s usually playing handsome and conflicted. Paunchy, shuffling, his hair trimmed back into a balding pate, Eckhart is unrecognizable at first and he builds Rooney from the disappointed guts outward. Vinny Pazienza’s story is a pretty amazing one and certainly deserving of a movie. It’s when “Bleed for This’’ looks through Kevin Rooney’s bleary eyes, though, that the punches seem to land.

★★★

BLEED FOR THIS

Directed by Ben Younger. Written by Younger, Pippa Bianco, and Angelo Pizzo. Starring Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Ciarán Hinds. At Boston Common, Fenway, suburbs. 116 minutes. R (language, sexuality/nudity, some accident images, men pounding each other into hamburger for your entertainment).

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.