Bronson (18)

Tom Hardy gives a majestic performance as the other Charles Bronson

We Brits, we do love our hard men, and we love films that celebrate them. The latest is the story of the most adulated UK tough alive today, Charles Bronson – toasted in headline legend as "Britain's most violent prisoner". But Bronson is not your expected tabloid job for the lads' post-pub DVD market: it's more a Brechtian black comedy, set to Wagner, Verdi and Delibes. Not only that, it has a Danish art-house auteur at the helm.

Bronson is directed and co-written by Nicolas Winding Refn, who made the Pusher trilogy, bleak moral tales from Copenhagen low life. 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. But for sheer confrontational verve – and for making you feel as uncomfortable as you would be taking tea with the film's anti-hero – Bronson is quite something.

Refn and co-writer Brock Norman Brock succeed in making a biography out of an existence that, by rational standards, is no one's idea of a life. Born Michael Peterson, Bronson – rechristened by a boxing promoter – has spent 35 years in prison, 30 of them in solitary. Judging by the film, there wasn't a great deal of event, still less glory, in his life outside. After a post office robbery, a close-up shows us Bronson's haul, a handful of tenners.

Neither the film, nor Bronson as narrator, attempts to explain his violence, pointing out the cosy normality of his childhood, then skipping promptly to his schooldays, as he batters pupils and teachers alike. His problem is anything but "anger management": his anger is managed, even stage-managed, for maximum effect. He's a performer, an anger artist, who presents himself as an elemental force. At the start, he's seen naked, daubed with black, looking like one of Tolkien's Orcs freshly burst from the ground, as he takes on a squad of prison officers: all this shot through a blood-red filter and set to an operatically desolate Scott Walker song.

Tom Hardy's Bronson himself plays our cheerfully menacing host. Narrating his career on stage to a half-seen audience, he appears in clown's pancake, crooning along to newsreel of his exploits or acting out a one-man Punch-and-Judy dialogue, his face divided into male and female halves. A little of this theatricality goes a long way, but also demystifies a man who is presented as unknowably multiple. He is neither the legendary Public Enemy, nor an easily classifiable pathology: the man we see is a dreamer playing to an audience of one, in his own head. While he has plenty to say for himself on stage, off stage Bronson is inarticulate and oddly defenceless. Visiting his Uncle Jack – who inhabits an exotic salon-cum-brothel, an implausible Home Counties echo of Blue Velvet – "Mickey" sits silently twiddling the swizzle stick in his drink, as if waiting for someone to pass him the next page of script.

As the film explores the gap between Bronson's myth and his real self, the term "inner child", for once, is not a cliché: with his shaven head and penchant for nudity, Bronson resembles a giant baby venting its fury. His civvy-street persona is bizarre: bristling moustaches and dapper three-piece suit, a cross between a sergeant major and a Victorian strongman. His sexuality is marked by terror: seduced by one of Jack's attendant tarts, he flexes a trembling forearm. He's an infantile embodiment of machismo in a film peopled by effete authority figures and camp clever-clogs types, such as seedy promoter Paul (Matt King, louchely brittle in leather gloves) and an art teacher bizarrely played by James Lance, all twinkly dance steps and "Olé!" Spanish.

It may be that sticking a pair of whiskers on an actor brings out the inner Daniel Day-Lewis, but Tom Hardy gives a majestically eccentric, barnstorming performance. His mercurial Bronson changes not just from scene to scene, but even in mid-look, jovial beam suddenly falling away to a blankly ominous glare. Most surprising about his Bronson are the shifts into whiny pathos. There's a lovely Joe Orton-ish moment when, visiting his parents' new home after years inside, he learns his old childhood bed is long gone. "Well, is my bed still in Luton?" he pleads.

It's extraordinary that a film so often cell-bound should have a Kubrickian grandeur, but then the cameraman is Dick Smith, who photographed Eyes Wide Shut; when Bronson stands like a bewildered giant in the chintzy enclosure of his parents' house, we get distinct echoes of A Clockwork Orange. Bronson also feels very much a tribute to Lindsay Anderson; its authority figures could have stepped out of O Lucky Man!. Like that film's Mick, Bronson is a picaresque pilgrim – except that his progress leads nowhere. Bronson ends the film in his smallest cage yet, contracted to the size of his body, emitting animal-like roars.

There have been complaints that the film glorifies its protagonist – but that's hardly the case. At one point, faced with Bronson's self-aggrandising defiance, his prison governor sighs, "You're ridiculous" – and at moments, it's hard not to agree. But in his own mind, the film's Charlie Bronson is a star – and like many stars, perhaps he just wanted to be alone.