True

By RICHARD CORLISS

MY LEFT FOOT Directed by Jim Sheridan; Screenplay by Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton

The Irish will put up a good fight, even when they're shadowboxing. So Christy Brown had a head start in his battle against petrifying cerebral palsy. There were other crippling odds to buck. He was the tenth of 22 children born to a sod-poor Dublin bricklayer. For the first nine years of Christy's life, his siblings tended him as they would a houseplant: feed it, water it and keep it out of the way. Only his mother dared nurture him with her fierce, uncompromising love, and one day Christy stuck a piece of chalk in his left foot and made his mark on the floor: MOTHER.

My Left Foot, Brown's autobiography about his hard-won emergence as a painter and author, could be meat for good drama or the sap in a TV-movie treacle pudding. This Irish film is mostly meat. Knowing that the audience will embrace Christy, the filmmakers are free to make him as stubborn as he is courageous. For Christy everything begins with will: the will to be understood, to do well things he would not be thought able to do at all and, later, to be loved by the pretty doctor who would only admire and inspire him.

At the end the picture goes soft -- say, from the rigorous humanism of The Elephant Man to the emotional sops of Life Goes On. But that is no crucial flaw in what is at heart a love story written in pain. As Christy's parents, Brenda Fricker and Ray McAnally are flinty, unrouged, splendid. And Daniel Day-Lewis' triumph is nearly as spectacular as Christy's: to reveal the blind fury in his eyes and stunted gestures, to play him with a streak of fierce, black-Irish humor. Brilliantly, Day-Lewis shows a mind, and then a man, exploding from the slag heap of Christy's body. By R.C.