The story of Depression-era fighter and folk hero Jim Braddock, who defeated heavyweight champ Max Baer in a 15-round slugfest in 1935. [TRAILER]

STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

The recent trend in sports films is to amplify a sport’s importance and relevance, redefining a game as far more than just a game.

Unlike personal stories such as “Rocky” or “Raging Ball,” each from the ‘70’s, sports films now have wider meanings. In films like “Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Seabiscuit,” they have been depicted with a new degree of social import, varying in their ability to transform, say, a horse race into a societal turning point.

The key decision made by the uneven director Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”) in “Cinderella Man” is to spend considerable time outside the ring, developing the struggles of its characters and the larger context of its story. The result is a film that sells us on a larger world than just a boxing ring.

That said, it hardly starts at a low ebb. Rather, it begins with flash and energy, as Jim Braddock (Russell Crowe) fights beneath the lights of Madison Square Garden, lives the life of a winner and finds himself madly in love with Mae (Renee Zellweger).

Now flash forward to the dark days of America’s early 1930’s. Braddock is now merely one in a sea of faces down at the docks, looking for work. There is no food for his wife or three kids to eat in his cramped one-room apartment. And when he returns sporting a broken hand, beaten mercilessly in the ring as his sports career slumps, his wife is at once supportive and terrified. She realizes boxing is the last thing they have left.

Desperation turns to panic when the apartment’s heat is inevitably turned off, the kids are sent away and Braddock realizes his fists are his only tool to keep his family intact.

It is this careful creation of Braddock’s dark days prior to his triumph, as well as the keen strategizing of his manager, Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti), that makes “Cinderella Man” captivating in a believable way.

We understand who this man is, why he’s doing what he’s doing and how he overcomes seemingly-insurmountable odds to leave crowds and opponents stunned.

It is now time to finally recognize Russell Crowe as one of the few elite actors of his generation. From an overweight tobacco executive to a gladiator, warship captain, a schizophrenic math prodigy and now, even a boxer, he has chosen a wide array of parts and has brought something remarkable to each of them. Here, he’s a strong man, but also wounded by the world and aware of when it’s time to fight and when it’s time to swallow his pride. In the film’s most heartbreaking scene, he begs his former colleagues for the spare change to turn his heat back on. Zellweger and Giamatti deserve just as much, if not more credit, for their essential contributions from the sidelines. Zellweger is the practical counterpoint to Crowe, too strong to seem sappy and too heartbroken over her family to seem naïve or artificial. Giamatti is the shrewd but smart manager in Crowe’s corner, becoming that intense coach who genuinely seems like he could change the flow and intensity of a fight.

As all sports films require, there are later reaction shots of Zellweger and Giamatti during the pivotal match. But their presence here does not seem obligatory, but emotional. It is clear they have made these bit parts into something more.

Executives at Universal Pictures were surely terrified when last year’s “Million Dollar Baby” emerged as the most critically-acclaimed boxing film in decades. But “Cinderella Man,” in many ways, is a completely different experience. It is not about two personalities, but one, and is not a cerebral overview of the boxing world told from above, but seen from the trenches through the eyes of a fighter with mud, blood and anger on his face.

“Million Dollar Baby” built to what happens after the match is over. “Cinderella Man” is more about what happens before the fight and how, punch by punch, one man uses the ring to bring his family back from the brink.

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