In Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard plays Stéphanie, a woman who works at an aquatics-based theme park, collaborating with other handlers to guide killer whales through a routine while Katy Perry blares over loudspeakers. After a freak accident, Stéphanie wakes up in the hospital to discover that both her legs needed to be amputated at the knee. For someone whose professional life inexorably depends on physical capability, Stéphanie is understandably thrown into a deep depression. Simultaneously, the film tracks the story of Ali, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. Ali is an apparently directionless young man who arrives at his sister’s with a young son in tow, carried with resigned irritation rather than affection. He engages in a series of fleeting jobs that largely rely on his willingness to be brutish, including stints as a nightclub bouncer and a security guard. Eventually, he comes around to a method of making money that calls for nothing more than toughness and endurance, collecting cash as a combatant in an underground bare-knuckles boxing ring.

Director Jacques Audiard developed the film by combining two different offerings from Craig Davidson’s short story collection Rust and Bone. The storylines of the film start off fairly separate and when they converge, as it always clear they must, its awkward enough that it’s as if the axles of work have just gone over an enormous speed bump. Audiard and credited co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain (who also collaborated with Audiard on the excellent A Prophet) are more interested in bringing the stories together than making sure they precisely line up. It’s clear Stéphanie is attracted to Ali because he represents a connection to the total physical self that has been robbed from her, but that’s a sound thematic motivation far more than it is a reasonably established part of the narrative. (Presumably, Ali is attracted to Stéphanie because she looks like Marion Cottilard, although a theory could be floated that he finds some appeal in having someone he knows how to take care of.) They come together because Audiard wants them to come together and he can barely be bothered to conceive of a way for that to happen which makes sense.

If the raggedy, frayed ends of the narrative don’t mean much to Audiard, he at least provides a reasonably compelling argument that focusing on the emotion of the piece is just as important as getting the storytelling mechanics to turn cleanly. Despite some clunky portions and several moments that strain credibility, Ruse and Bone has a deep-set, wounding power. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the strong, modest performances of the two leads. Schoenaerts steadfastly plays his character as little more than a collection of flaws, with any glimmers of redemptive qualities little more than an illusion or, maybe more accurately, the projection of an audience hoping for him to slip into the hero groove. Cottilard is even better, deserving all of the buzz her performance has generated since the film debuted at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. In particular, she demonstrates how freeing oneself from the worst of the past is an agonizing but also energizing process. Her small triumphs have an uncommon potency, moving past the common manipulation of cinema to feel piercingly real.

Rust and Bone often comes across as a work that hasn’t been fully hammered into place, lacking the sort of intellectual focus that was probably required in bringing together two unrelated stories. Conversely, it could have used some of the anti-structure fearlessness employed by Robert Altman when he haphazardly stitched together a batch of Raymond Carver stories into Short Cuts. Audiard is probably too devoted to the seductive pleasures of melodrama to have gone the latter route, though. Where he winds up is a fitfully satisfying middle ground, where Rust and Bone is defined as much by where it falters as it is by the acuity and intensity of its roiling feelings.