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There’s something about gangsters and other violent sociopaths that will always fascinate us, though, and Refn plays to that fascination. Turning up his amp to 11, he makes his movie pulsate with adrenaline-charged music, hallucinogenic colors, frequent bursts of black humor, and recurrent explosions of intense, unpredictable violence.

I suppose, after all, Nicolas Winding Refn, the director and co-writer of "Bronson," was wise to leave out any sort of an explanation. Can you imagine how you'd cringe if the film ended in a flashback of little Mickey undergoing childhood trauma? There is some human behavior beyond our ability to comprehend.

Hardy put on the pounds of muscle, and it's him swinging his meaty fists and hurling around guards, but it's Refn you worry about hurting himself. He seems to sprain his imagination in his attempts to make Bronson interesting, sympathetic, and even redeemable.

The effect is a bit like Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” reimagined as a one-man stage show and stripped of any political implications. Bronson’s crimes become a kind of performance art, and the film becomes, bizarrely enough, the portrait of a genius misunderstood and marginalized by a bureaucratic and hypocritical social order.

There are times during Bronson when it’s unclear what Refn is going for, and times when the movie seems like a derivative, extra-pretentious version of A Clockwork Orange. For long stretches of Bronson, nothing much happens—and what does happen is, well, odd... But by the end of the movie, it becomes clearer how Refn uses stillness and nothingness to keep the audience tense and anxious.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, known for his Pusher trilogy, pushes hard at the boundaries of banal film biography.

Appropriately enough, the film can barely contain Tom Hardy’s performance. It’s a Method turn so bloodily immersive it’s hard to imagine the actor getting his head straight afterwards. Refn’s visual strategy reinforces both physical claustrophobia and mental closure.

Tom Hardy is a full-bodied assault on the senses in his turn as the eponymous antihero. His Charlie Bronson embodies stylised anarchy of a fashion not seen since Malcolm McDowell donned a bowler hat and boiler suit in A Clockwork Orange, or since Paul Newman tipped parking meters as an aimless drifter-turned-prisoner in Cool Hand Luke.

Refn's first British feature, Bronson is another case of visiting directors catching the tone of our national madness in ways that locals don't. Refn has made a sometimes maddeningly overstated film that almost outstays its welcome just as Bronson has outstayed his at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

Intentionally or not, Bronson comes across as an incredibly boring, conceited and inadequate man with an addiction to savagery and to the celebrity status it gives him in prison... the film offers no insight or perspective - just a smirking endorsement of Bronson's machismo.

This is bold film-making... But boldness isn't necessarily enough to hold a film together, and there are passages when it all feels a bit too loose, a bit too fancy, a bit too pleased with itself.

Hardy delivers a committed if showy performance, but there are some awful smaller turns which smell dangerously of homophobia. The whole thing made me want to scrub my brain with Vim.