For a flick called Fighting, there’s not much. Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) is a dopey nice guy selling fakes on New York sidewalks and occasionally sleeping on benches, a displaced Southerner lost and alone in the city. Befriended by small-time scammer Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard, playing it with his patented “conflicted smarm”), Shawn becomes a bare-knuckle street fighter, redeeming himself and his sins in a sweaty tank top.

And here, Fighting sort of ends. Though Shawn meets Zulay (Henao), a pretty waitress with a kid and a quirky nana (Altagracia Guzman), the film is only intermittently about this or fighting or anything other than Shawn’s complicated father-son-redux relationship with Harvey, which is awkward and sweet and occasionally painful.

The “salvation” theme is not surprising: Fighting’s director and co-writer Dito Montiel is also responsible for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a killer Robert Downey Jr. movie (also with Tatum) based on Montiel’s memoir of a Catholic-tough boyhood in Queens. Montiel’s disarming way with the dialogue and atmosphere of men’s relationships is here too, as is an insider’s version of New York City. In Fighting, NYC is experienced variously as striving hustler Harvey’s sandbox; a super-real mise en street of delivery vans and orange soda and cardboard; a Warriors back-alley dreamscape involving lots of chain-link and thugs and a coiffed lesbian mafia; a tragedy of low expectations with the cramped, shit-filled apartments seen in Kids; a gleaming marble underground lined with silent Asian fight spectators; and, of course, aspirational Manhattan, featuring fake-swank clubs and a high-rise restaurant, through which Shawn battles it out with his childhood nemesis. The multi-borough realness very nearly justifies what is otherwise a barely-there story that’s barely worth telling.