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Bronson is played by the young English actor Tom Hardy in a thunderbolt of a performance, immense and fearless in its physicality. Twitchy yet focused, Hardy's Bronson is pure kinetics; even when he is sitting still, it feels as if he is moving at ramming speed. It's as if every molecule of blood in the actor's body is vibrating and raring for release, which works perfectly because Bronson is a showman first and foremost.
And as befits a showman, he has to command the screen. Written by Brock Norman Brock and Refn, Bronson is essentially a one-man show with few other faces appearing on screen for more than one scene. Refn has to strike a balance between Bronson's physical life and the life inside his head, and the director's technical chops are up to the challenge. Juggling narrative structure, playing with camera movement, lighting, and music, he creates a film that seems to inhabit the unhinged psyche of its subject.
It's an aesthetic as blunt as Bronson's left hook, but it also offers some surprisingly touching moments: At one point early in the film, upon his release from a psych ward where he was rendered nearly catatonic by pills, Bronson dresses in a suit and goes to see his uncle. He is introduced both to bare-knuckle boxing and a bored redhead named Irene. She uses him for a quick screw, but he thinks it's love and proposes to her with a stolen ring. It's a funny and oddly heartbreaking moment as he is inevitably led back to jail, smiling widely under his steel-baron mustache.
In that scene and a few others, we begin to understand why Bronson prefers tight cells and solitary confinement. The muscled brute fancies himself an artist and sees the boxing and his fights with the guards as bruised and bloodied performance art. His infamy is based on an inability to embrace his public. Now a prize-winning poet and novelist, Bronson needs to be alone to work; indeed, one could say that his very existence is his work. If given the space of common life for too long, he might very well explode and do something dangerous.
The DVD includes Bronson monologues, interviews with cast and crew, and several making-of featurettes.
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