And New Champion ...

This, however, badly misses the point. The street fighting was true to Lowell and to the Ward saga; the boxing scenes wind up being so powerful precisely because we spend so much time in a living room, a crack house, a bar. Even the momentous belt Ward competes for by the end—in reality, the little-known WBU title, against little-known Shea Neary, in London—is less important for what it means to ring aficionados than for what it signifies in context, after all this time, in Ward's life and on screen.

Wahlberg, who refuses to gloat or sling I-told-you-so's amid mounting Oscar buzz, is acutely sympathetic to such a concept. According to the numbers, he notes, "I spent more money paying my trainers and having them travel with me than I got paid, by a good half a million dollars." No matter: What Micky Ward's biggest fan will remember, lucidly, is that he really wanted to do something and found a way.