Fighting with My Family movie review: This Lena Headey film delivers a punch

That, for all its artifice, all its drama, all its showmanship and all its celebration of physical torture, WWE holds a certain charm for many is undeniable.

How much is what this film is about. Based on a true story about a British 18-year-old who remains the youngest WWE diva champion ever, and who changed how the sport viewed its women in the ring, Fighting With My Family puts its actors in a familiar arena and still manages to deliver a punch.

Barring ‘Coach’, who is Vince Vaughn being Vince Vaughn, the film has a delightfully serious cast of English actors, starting with Lena Headey of Game of Thrones. Plus Vaughn with his slightly sardonic, slightly paunchy, always laid-back approach, doesn’t look like he would survive any of the tricks he is teaching his bunch of wards.

But Pugh playing Brittany or Paige, as she is known in the ring, is another matter altogether. She is tough, vulnerable, ambitious, uncertain, and very, very young.

As her brother who does not make it to the WWE, Lowden (also seen in Dunkirk) brings out the dilemma of a sibling who has all along competed for the same thing and doesn’t know how to react when his little sister walks away with the honours.

Writer-director Merchant, who also has a charming cameo, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the Knight family’s past, present or desired future of wrestling fame. He also strips off quite a few assumptions about the string of minimally clad blondes that populate the WWE world. And gives you a lesson or two on the difference between ‘fake’ and ‘fixed’ (the sport is latter); and about what the WWE wrestlers are trying to do (telling a story, being ‘a soap opera in spandex’, with one of its well-loved tales being, yes, ‘baby doll vs heels’).

To America, the haven of WWE, the film also holds a few lessons about England: that Norwich is ‘Norrich’, and that there is more to it than Mary Poppins and Harry Potter.

Dwayne ‘Rock’ Johnson, also the producer and perhaps WWE’s best known and most successful stars, turns up at opportune moments to be fawned over and to guide Paige along.

Even if you don’t quite get the high promised by Brittany’s mother (Headey), of being in the ring being like doing ‘coke, crack and heroin’ together, you can feel what it means to Paige and her family.

Plus the mother says this to her children when they are 13 or thereabouts. Excuse the swear words, and they turn out alright. That’s a comforting thought, at the very least.