REEL CRITIC:’Champ’ a technical knockout of a movie

“Resurrecting the Champ,” the new film from director Rod Lurie, is a well-crafted story that deals with the consequences that people encounter when they live lives of abject dishonesty. The film also deals with the fragile relationships between fathers and sons vis-à -vis a glimpse into the grimy world of professional boxing.

Samuel L. Jackson turns in a stellar performance as “Battlin’ Bob” Satterfield, a long-retired heavyweight boxer who has been reduced to a life of homelessness on the streets and back alleys of Denver. Josh Hartnett as Erik Kernan Jr., a struggling sports writer for the Denver Times, chases away a small gang of youths who have been harassing Satterfield and quickly befriends the former boxer with the intent of writing a story about him.

Jackson as Satterfield is glib and wily and immediately likable and stands out in stark contrast to the troubled Erik Kernan, whose world is far more desolate than that of the homeless former prize fighter. Hartnett’s Kernan is luckless and disingenuous, and we see why when we witness his callow role in the relationship he has with his young son and his estranged wife, Joyce, ably played by the lithesome Kathryn Morris.

“Resurrecting the Champ” is as compelling a tale as I have seen in quite some time, and the story is fleshed out by the excellent work of Alan Alda and David Paymer, who as editors find themselves face to face with Hartnett’s character and challenge Hartnett to be so much better. It was very nice to see Alda again and Paymer, whose face everyone recognizes from his many roles over the years.

The relationship that the hapless Kernan is trying to build with his son, Teddy (Dakota Goyo), is undermined by Kernan’s unwillingness to just be himself, and it is brought out in a painful episode where parents are invited to their child’s classroom to speak about their work. Kernan (Hartnett) is caught in a lie he has told about his relationship with a famous sports figure, and his young son is humiliated in a gut-wrenching scene with his peers.

Director Lurie uses old black-and-white film clips of boxing matches from the 1950s to further the story, and it makes the events all the more believable. Also, the street scenes of brief violence are nicely dovetailed with the tense moments in the newsroom, and it is sometimes difficult to tell whose life is worse — Satterfield’s miserable existence pushing an overloaded cart through skid row or Kernan’s troubles with an overbearing editor.