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I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie, so I think I expected it to embrace the simpler, fictional side of wrestling, to be set entirely within the world of wrestling: that the results of the matches would be unknown to the wrestlers and the events in the ring would be spontaneous and un-booked. What I got was, instead, something much more complicated: a movie that embraces the strange twilight limbo of modern wrestling fandom, in which reality and fiction are mingled in ways impossible to untangle. It’s a movie that captures with uncanny, affectionate accuracy not the reality of wrestling, but the reality of being a wrestling fan, with all of its joys and pains.

If you’re an English-speaking wrestling fan, the odds are fairly good you won’t get a chance to see this movie with subtitles, at least not for a while. So until then, if you choose to continue, this review is a spoiler-filled look at “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler”–leaving out a lot of various subplots, but looking especially at how it captures the experience of being a wrestling fan in this modern age.

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“Well Done, Cockroach,” a review of “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” is up now at Spectacle of Excess!