Dir: Paddy Considine; Starring: Paddy Considine, Jodie Whittaker, Anthony Welsh, Tony Pitts, Brendan Ingle, Paul Popplewell, Matt Insley. 15 cert, 92 mins

Paddy Considine’s Journeyman is a film about a boxer. But is it actually a boxing film? The hero of the piece, played by Considine himself, is Matty Burton, a world middleweight champion from Sheffield whose prime you sense has recently crested. But we only see him in the ring once, for a hard-won title defence during which he sustains a grave cranial trauma that throws his entire life into a daze.

The real fight in the film is Matty’s struggle for recovery – in which victory means turning back into a functioning husband to his wife Emma (Jodie Whittaker, the 13th Doctor) and a functioning father to their baby girl Mia.

His identity as a lover, provider and local hero has been totally dismantled, and what we’re watching him rebuild is his own masculinity – which is by no means a subject that cinema, British indie or otherwise, has a proud history of handling with any degree of intelligence or tact. But with its arsenal of big, honest emotions, deployed without show or sentiment, Journeyman is an exception.

Boxing is the backdrop to Matty’s story, informing and framing every single shaky step of it. Yet with the exception of that opening fight, and its preambular hullaballoo, the sport itself – which gives every other boxing film from Raging Bull down its stakes and charge – isn’t really there at all. It is both completely integral and beautifully beside the point.