One of my favorite musicians ever is Gary Allan. True, that’s almost certainly because I was a girly growing up in Texas in the mid-2000s. How could I not have some artistic appreciation for the “Songs About Rain” and “Man to Man” singer? Still, there is something extra tactile about the grit in Allan’s voice when he harmonizes downbeat songs. Many 2000s country songs suffer from the overproduced, grandiose scale Chris Neal of Country Weekly felt ultimately killed the 2009 Rascal Flatts ditty “Why”. Introspective tendencies are stifled by simultaneous indulgences in making something people can rock out to in a stadium. Allan’s hauntingly sparse tunes like "Best I Ever Had" or "Lovin' You Against My Will" never had that problem.
Instead, this singer just let his distinctively weary vocals exude a lifetime of pain. Rather than dovetailing into a final verse eschewing the tune’s sad energy, Allan songs like “Today” fully committed to sorrow. Even later tracks like "It Ain't the Whiskey" registered vocal angst many country singers could hope to evoke. Jack Huston's directorial debut Day of the Fight would undoubtedly have liked some of that mournful Gary Allan magical too. On paper, this movie aims to be a melancholy mixture of Inside Llewyn Davis and Raging Bull. On-screen, it’s an inert exercise that’s too clean-cut to realize its grimy ambitions.
Boxer Mike Flannigan (Michael Pitt) hasn't fought in a while. It's been nearly a decade, per dialogue within Huston's script. Awkward flashbacks reveal that a doctor informed Flannigan that one more stint in the ring could cause a deadly aneurysm. However, Day of the Fight begins with Flannigan waking up roughly 12 hours before returning to his passion in a Madison Square Garden skirmish. As he whittles down the seconds until that showdown, Mike saunters around his old New York stomping grounds.
This leads him to encounter various familiar faces in his life, including his uncle (Steve Buscemi) and his abusive father (Joe Pesci), now a dementia-stricken shell of his former self. Across these encounters, Huston’s script constantly frustrates with its excessive tidiness. The monochromatic color scheme and emphasis on grim backstories (including Flannigan’s marriage and career crumbling after he killed somebody in a car accident) solidify Day of the Fight’s ambitions to be a meditative piece of cinema. However, Huston keeps making everything explicit rather than fascinatingly ambiguous to viewers.
Constant flashbacks to the past are already a problem in Day of the Fight. Huston can’t leave Flannigan’s torment to our imaginations, a choice robbing the man of his grim mystique. Worse, though, is what’s often paired with these flashbacks. Particularly in a scene depicting Flannigan and priest pal Patrick (John Magaro) talking about yesteryear trauma, Huston’s script lathers voice-over dialogue all over footage depicting Flannigan’s regrettable past. It’s all so didactic and ensures someone like Patrick never registers as a character. He and other supporting players are just physical vessels for spouting Flannigan’s backstory. Lore dominates Day of the Fight and prevents it from reaching its neo-realism ambitions.
I also kept spending Day of the Fight salivating for some actual conflict or turmoil between the characters. Instead, this is the rare mopey movie where everyone frowns yet exhibits nothing but kindness to one another. Flannigan wails about how he can’t escape his past and worries that nobody likes him. Simultaneously, a local lady hands Flannigan a free meal at his go-to eatery, he’s on good terms with every person he encounters, and cab drivers happily give him rides “on the house.” Even his ex-wife Jessica (Nicolette Robinson) barely needs any coercing to go on a walk with him.
At times, Flannigan seems to exist in the town from “Life’s a Happy Song,” not a harsh landscape where he can’t escape his sins. A superior version of Day of the Fight would’ve leaned into the dissonance between this reality and Flannigan’s depressed, suicidal mindset. With all the drama playing out in a superficial fashion, the lack of interpersonal tension between Day of the Fight characters becomes a drag. This problem dovetails nicely into the weirdly clean-cut world Huston and cinematographer Peter Simonite set this feature in. Flannigan exists in a period-era version of New York devoid of grime or personality.
The digital camerawork and derivative backdrops look like they belong in 2008 YouTube videos, not 2024 motion pictures…and especially not 2024 motion pictures harkening back to gritty 70s New York dramas. Even this shortcoming, though, isn’t the most fatal Day of the Fight flaw. That honor belongs to Michael Pitt’s thoroughly unengaging performance. With a hoodie permanently perched on his back and a morose expression plastered on his face, Pitt constantly looks like Holt McCallany cosplaying Jesse Pinkman. His default instinct as an actor is to just yell out his lines, like when he’s portraying Flannigan pressuring Jessica to come out for a stroll.
If he’s not turning up the volume, Pitt looks like the wrong kind of lost playing this disheveled boxer. He fails to register much of a pulse or personality, partially because Huston’s script often gives him only exposition to deliver. However, Pitt’s subpar physicality is also a problem. Decades of turmoil don’t waft off the man. Pitt plays Flannigan with mild grouchiness, not caked-in angst. His body language lacks specificity, especially whenever he’s playing opposite pros like Magaro or Perlman who can exude decades of lived-in experiences without blinking. His line deliveries also fail to enhance the film's stilted writing, as exemplified by a scene where Flannigan whitesplains James Brown to a Black 12-year-old girl. Innately cringe-worthy phrasing but the world of boxing cinema has produced many unforgettable leading men turns. Michael Pitt in Day of the Fight is not one of them.
Day of the Fight yeans to be a melancholy exercise about mortality and legacy. Unfortunately, Huston can’t resist sentimental and didactic filmmaking impulses. Not even an actor of Joe Pesci’s caliber can save this film. It should be a piece of cake to wring emotional power out of seeing the classically spry and motormouthed Pesci playing Flannigan’s non-verbal and wheelchair-bound father. Huston and composer Ben MacDiarmid, though, suffocate the sequence in a ham-fisted and unimaginative score. Detracting from Pesci's acting talents (not to mention leaning on a way too crisp visual scheme) is not how you make cinema as drenched in tangible regret as Gary Allan's "Watching Airplanes."