The gritty Bronson is anchored by a knockout central performance, writes DONALD CLARKE.

THIS BLOOD-curdling new film from Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director of Pusher,sounds a little like a retread of Andrew Dominik's Chopper. Once again, an iconic hard-man – this time, the notorious English bruiser Charles Bronson – is being offered a dubious, viscera-drenched tribute.

Largely set in and around British prisons, the film inevitably calls up further memories of A Clockwork Orange. But, strangely enough, Bronson's most conspicuous debts are to the early, deranged freak shows of Ken Russell. Featuring long monologues delivered to camera and brilliant use of classical and popular music, Refn's film makes a case for the school of unashamedly vulgar theatricality that Russell pioneered 40 years ago. Such oddness is very welcome in these drab days.

Mind you, despite all that heritage weighing on its shoulders, Bronsonsomehow manages to emerge as its own class of muscle-rending monster. The story, told in stops and starts, tells how one Michael Gordon Peterson, following a mildly troubled childhood in Merseyside and Luton, was arrested for a bungled post office robbery in 1974.

Two brief periods of freedom aside, Peterson – who changed his name to Charles Bronson when bare-knuckle boxing – has remained in prison ever since, and 30 years of his sentence has been spent in solitary confinement. A serial brawler and hostage taker, he is often described as Britain’s most violent criminal.

Football thugs who come to the cinema expecting a retread of Green Streetshould prepare themselves for a surprise. Refn, making a significant advance on his previous work, has the courage to anchor large parts of his film in avant-garde territory. The surges of Wagner would particularly please Russell, and the layering of New Order's Your Silent Facebeneath one of Charley's rare moments of freedom is surprisingly touching.

Every now and then we find ourselves in a theatre where the extravagantly moustached Bronson – an unholy blend of Archie Rice from The Entertainerand Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood– offers the vacant stalls a noisy summary of his enthusiasms and discontents. Sometimes, as in the protracted, inconclusive final sequence, Refn allows too much disorder to creep in, but this remains a bravura directorial performance from a stubbornly peculiar film-maker.

This film does, however, belong to its astonishing, electrifying star. (Yes, I did allude to Lawrence Olivier and Daniel Day Lewis in the previous paragraph. Steven Berkoff also springs to mind.) Previously seen as Bill Sykes in an ITV version of Oliver Twist, Tom Hardy beefs up to turn Bronson into a furiously charismatic carnival busker with fists the size of combine harvesters.

That magnetism might, perhaps, worry some hand-wringers. For all his beastliness, Bronson, who comes to develop an interest in painting, remains the hero of the film and, rather than being sobering or shocking, the outbreaks of violence are always indecently spine-tingling.

Coiled up in a ball of repressed fury for much of the picture, Hardy truly comes alive when he is allowed to indulge in his bouts of flailing, eye-gouging martial ballet. When tensions ease, it is unsettling to consider quite how much one yearns for the next punch-up.

Yet one of Refn's aims is, surely, to ponder the vicarious thrill that Bronson's career has offered the readers of tabloid newspapers and pulpy biographies. As well as posing questions about the absurdity of keeping a petty criminal in prison for three decades, the picture dares to invite serious film-goers to acknowledge their own baser instincts. Come to think of it, Ken Russell did something similar in The Devils .

You may be slightly appalled by Bronson, but you will find it hard to look away.

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Tom Hardy, Hugh Ross, Juliet Oldfield, Jonny Phillips, James Lance 18 cert, lim release, 92 min★★★★