The life of a boxer soars like the turkey vulture between profound, dark gorges of tragedy and sunny expanses of triumph. Every existential platitude, in fact, can be found in the lives of the men of the bruising game and the culminating spectacle of two of them in a ring, there to subdue – utterly defeat, if possible – one-another in the most rudimentary way imaginable.

And yet boxing is such a metaphor for life – another cliché, I know – that we never tire of those platitudes. They have been endlessly refashioned and presented anew by the very best of America’s authors and auteurs for decades now.

Australia’s artists and intellectuals are slightly different. Many of them consider it infra dig to expend intellectual energy on common pursuits. Thankfully, the producer/director of Inside Fighter, actor Nick Barkla, considered the story of Frank LoPorto worth telling.

Frank LoPorto, an Italian-Australian boxer, was, at 33 years of age, after 14 punishing years in the ring, thrown a lifeline by WBA world Super-Welterweight champion, Austin Trout in 2011. He had a mere five weeks to prepare. Planning and executing a training regime for a world title fight when you’ve begun behind scratch and you have only five weeks is a tremendously difficult, almost scientific, task. Frank trained himself to exhaustion and tapered to perfection. Was he truly prepared, though, for what was to come? Science, after all, is not his thing.

Barkla himself was given 24 hours to pick up a camera – something he’d never done before in earnest – and begin recording Frank’s journey. With intimate access before, during and after the fight, Barkla enables us to experience his journey in all its immediacy.

There are reasons why LoPorto engages us and Barkla has a fine instinct for those reasons. Scene by scene, he connects the audience directly to his subject with cords woven of their heart-strings. And hides himself. Barkla didn’t necessarily set out to produce a work of Cinema Vérité. The form is as natural for Frank’s story as, well, frankness itself. And besides, Frank had little notice, neither did Barkla. Why should we?

Inside Fighter is pitilessly minimalist. The story tells itself, without narrative trappings. It needs no voiceover or talking heads, just strategic use of screen text to orient us. The big challenge for Barkla was that of finely sculpting the rugged boulder of video material at the end of it all. He selects just the right details to achieve his end of bringing Frank to us just as Frank is.

LoPorto fits many moulds in the film. He was Joe Palooka, the yokel, as Ralph Ellison would have called him, up against a Real Fighter. Dare I even invoke another of those clichés: Rocky? Frank gave himself the handle “Italian Stallion.” Indeed, the Rocky parallels were so numerous, it would have been easy for art to hijack Frank’s reality. Barkla resisted, but Rocky is invoked several times by Frank’s entourage and various kinfolk.

But Frank was also, like Rocky, unmistakably a boxer of Italian heritage. Fighters of Italian descent that I know of and have met mostly share a certain manner: gentle-eyed, decent, respectful, deferential, always dignified, completely lacking in assumption. They savour simple pleasures; they like to feel dapper. They present a real counterpoint to the callous compagni who often populate their world.

Three little opening vignettes sum Frank up. We see him playing with a remote control car, enjoying a guilty smoke and gingerly removing a splinter from his finger with tweezers, a boxer who lives with pain we barely understand feeling ordinary pain like the rest of us.

It’s clear Frank lacks the solipsism required for a great fighter. He’s not the sort of bloke who ever fought for money, he tells us. One of boxing’s many helots, he’s no harlot. Frank is one of those fighters who deserve more respect than Madam Boxing, who sends their bodies out to work and keeps their souls in a draw, ever gives them.

But occasionally even a bloke like Frank gets his number drawn. Fourteen years of slavery; fourteen years of neurological erosion in gym spars and ring wars, and Frank gets his notice, his “big chance”. Destiny’s spam scam. Fate goes phishing. When that happens, even an honest rogue like Frank has no choice but to take the scrap of bait if he’s going to bother lacing on the gloves at all. There’s little other point to fighting. The trouble is that it’s easy to mistake any slight hope for victory. In boxing, the upper income bracket is the only income bracket. To enter it is, for a man like Frank, to feel special, like mama always said he was.

Frank saw his chance as a reason to celebrate. We see him interviewed in his gym after the Trout announcement, thick of nose, thick of voice. “Small-time’s not enough” he says with a cheerful smile. “My mum always said I was gunna get somewhere … she was right. She’s being sayin’ it for years.”

Would this be on a par with the surprise call Fighting Harada’s management made to Lionel Rose? The unexpected shot Jose Legra’s people gave Famechon? Or the chance Eckhardt Dagge gave another Italian-Australian, Rocky Mattioli? They all beat the world champions. Such stories are like the resin on the bottom of a boxer’s boots. Footholds of faith.

When Barkla found him, around the time the film begins, it’s hard to say whether Frank was still living on hope. He was 33, after all. Frank’s a child-like fellow, and since his glorious, unexpected win over the more-fancied Daniel Dawson for the vacant PABA Junior-Middleweight title a year earlier, he’d settled into his normal life, which obviously included the odd beer and furtive ciggy. It wasn’t the sort of thing a fixated professional would entertain, but then, Frank wasn’t even a full-time pro. He supplemented his meagre income from the sport with a job on the docks, as any headliner from the 1930s did. It was the case when they filled arenas and it’s still the case. The game hasn’t moved on much. AFL players demand big salaries on the premise that the best years of their youth are dominated by their sport. Not so an Australian boxer.

Once the announcement came, Frank went along with his minor celebrity status, trying hard to look menacing in photo shoots. But he’s a fighter, and the bracing self-talk of self-delusion keeps a fighter going. His respectful summation of his opponent is laced with the sophistries a fighter finds as necessary as his mouthguard or groin shield. “I’ll be too strong for him”, he assures his mentor, a leathery old Italian ex-pug. “He’s had 23 fights, unbeaten. The losses I had, I was never prepared for them.” All necessary lies. Short-cuts to mental readiness. Psychic placebos.

Because Frank is such an uncomplicated character, lovable, unaffected and straightforward, it throws his surroundings into sharp relief: a sport that is way too uncaring and inhumane, an opponent who is way too smart.

Those “Rocky” references are never too far away for the promotors, either. If Frank hadn’t named himself the “Italian Stallion”, it would have been necessary for them to do so. If he hadn’t, he’d be the “Thunder from Down Under.” Boxing’s world abounds in cheap, predictable clichés.

But you could see Frank wasn’t comfortable in this world of elevated vulgarity. For the “stare-off” publicity shots, face-to-face with Trout, he stared uneasily skyward. He didn’t want to even seem to dislike his opponent. Frank’s features are sometimes reminiscent of Jeff Fenech’s, but that’s where the similarity ends. Fenech had the gift of inexhaustible anger. Frank had little of it. Trout was himself a humble man. The lead-up to the match lacks the antagonistic rodomontade that characterises most pre-fight banter.

At one point, Frank’s trainer notes that Trout is too nice: “you’ll kill him”, he assures Frank. But Frank only replies with a slightly hurt “I’m nice too!” It’s just one of many telling little scenes in El Paso during the week before the fight. There are many others that hint at the magnitude of Frank’s challenge. So many are touchingly ironic.

But the filmmaker doesn’t overstate the ironies – they’re everywhere, all the way up to the moment of the fight itself, when Frank walks down the aisle into the half-empty arena to the heavy strains of Hell’s Bells, and beyond.

The big fight itself? From the opening punch, it unfolds its own brutal truth, and speaks for itself. The truth is that Frank was a swarming fighter, but not a cunning one. He’s a guileless man and was a guileless boxer, relying on his ability to take a punch and his non-stop, close-up style. Trout, on the other hand, was a highly-skilled professional. Six times, for Frank, hell’s bells sounded, and before the seventh, an end was put to the massacre.

Frank’s story is a parable with no need for interpretation.

There are few stories more poignant than that of the unsuccessful boxer, especially one who’s had a long career. Yet not all of them elicit compassion. If we have any fellow-feeling for them at all, it’s the sort we might have felt for an Ahab or Faust as we witnessed their abject failure to dominate nature or give God a whacking.

The siren-song of hope seduces us all, but when a fighter is finally forced to quit that terrible game, he can only hope that it’s at least set him up for life. Madam Boxing often sends the fighter away a more bitter and less naïve man. Frank retires neither.

Barkla wisely doesn’t end there. He visits Frank a year later to give us a happy postscript – not that we need happy endings. Frank’s story demands narrative fulfilment because Barkla has made us care.

It ends in Phillip Island. Frank seems a little thicker of voice, heavier of bearing, but content. Materially, he has little to show for those fourteen years. Physically, it’s extracted pounds of flesh. Frank capers happily, irrepressibly, with his girlfriend – he’s just proposed to her via text – and her friends. They rib him for the manner of his proposal. He skips off and waves, in his ebullient, inelegant way, to the camera.

He leaves us truly hoping he passes happily into life-loving middle-age and beyond; that the cruel boxing game is out of his life; that it mercifully refrains from calling in the balance of his debt.