“Donnybrook” is a movie about, among other things, bare-knuckle fighting, but it’s the viewers who will feel beaten down. And it won’t take very long, either, as it seems almost every encounter in this lugubrious, headache-inducing drama involves violence.

Even the announcement of the title, its stark black letters slammed against a blood-red background, feels like an assault. This is a movie that makes its points with a piledriver, the coarseness extending to characters’ names. At the center is Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell), a desperate veteran with two children and a drug-addicted wife. (Back story — any story, really — is so minimal we’re forced to make a great many inferences on our own.) Hoping for a fresh start, Earl plans to enter the Donnybrook (the word derives from Dublin’s infamously rowdy Donnybrook Fair), an illicit cage fight whose $100,000 prize would finance his wife’s recovery and his family’s future.

A gun-store robbery (how else will he find the fight’s entry fee?) kicks off Earl’s, and the film’s, odyssey of brutality. Its main engine is a terrifying meth dealer named Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo), a slab of psychosis whose seemingly longtime beef with Earl is never made quite clear. To amuse himself while tracking Earl and managing his meth heads, Angus maintains a revoltingly abusive, possibly incestuous relationship with his deeply damaged sister, Delia (Margaret Qualley). You could feel sorry for her were her behavior not at times as disgusting as his.

Based on Frank Bill’s 2013 novel of the same name (whose paperback cover says it all), “Donnybrook,” set in Indiana and filmed in Ohio, is a one-dimensional wallow in rural Midwestern miserabilism. Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing. A vivid peony of blood on white kitchen tiles leaps from the movie’s downbeat palette (the cinematography, by David Ungaro, is often quite striking), yet the body it came from inspires no feeling. There’s more emotional resonance in a Punch and Judy show.

Filled with poverty, futility and angry white men, “Donnybrook” has feet of lead and not much of a brain.

“You still tweakin’ from killin’ those Muslim babies?” Delia taunts Earl with the pointless cruelty of the chronically stupid. In the press notes, the director, Tim Sutton (whose previous feature, “Dark Night” (2017), was about a mass shooting), calls this film “an American folk tale” and claims “It’s important to try and capture the pulse of society.” Maybe Sutton does have something valuable to say about economic deprivation and lack of opportunity. But with “Donnybrook” — especially the climactic fight scene, complete with a redneck rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” — he risks instead the appearance of condescension to the very demographic he seeks to represent.

Either way, the movie wears you down. At one point, we watch Delia sit motionless in a car, her mouth wrapped around a gun barrel, for what feels like five minutes. I didn’t see a single muscle move, and thought the film had broken down. And then I wished that it had.

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“Donnybrook”

Rated R for stabbing, shooting, pounding and pummeling. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.