Major Pain, Minor Glory - By ANDY WEBSTER

The taunts in the ring may be make-believe, but the slams against the mat are agonizingly genuine in Robert Greene’s vivid documentary “Fake It So Real,” which examines the weeklong preparations for a Saturday night independent-wrestling match in Lincolnton, N.C.

Mr. Greene follows members of the Millennium Wrestling Federation — burly performers with stage names like Solar, Pitt, Van Damage and Mikado — as they mercilessly punish their bodies for the roar of their small-town audience (often children), and for barely any money.

There is backstage drama: the group’s manager, Jeff Roberts (a k a Outlaw), has an infection that may force him to miss his first bout in a decade; Richie Owenby (J-Prep) describes an asthmatic childhood spent tormented for his prodigious posterior; Gabriel Croft, a fresh-faced initiate into this costumed fraternity, on probation stemming from a fraught breakup with a girlfriend, has adopted the guise of his namesake angel as his gimmick.

We watch the members of the group rigorously choreograph the show’s boasts, brawls and arguments and comment on one another. And the rehearsals, to say nothing of the actual event, can be brutal: each missed landing and leap from the ropes onto the mat (sometimes a hardwood floor) ends with excruciating impact. There’s no mistaking the grimaces as these men suffer dearly for their homegrown art.

The big night is sheer carnival hokum, an undistilled backwoods theater of makeup, masks, vinyl trunks and relentless pounding. And yet the post-bout exhilaration offstage is palpable, even for a pursuit that can only be a one-way ticket to lower-back pain.