A foot? Honestly. No one’s going to want to see a movie about a foot, what with its corresponding thoughts of toe jam and nail clippings. Have the disabled man paint with a brush in his mouth. Much more dignified. If we’re going to set it in Ireland, we’ve got to have the scene where his mom’s stash of money for a wheelchair ends with his father taking it all down to the pub and blowing it on Powers. There’s far too much love altogether in this movie. Where are the scenes of his 12 brothers and sisters cruelly locking him in a cupboard, or the superficially kindly clinic staff electroshocking him and throwing him in a tub of ice water, or his parents throwing him in the sewer to float downstream to the Gotham Zoo, where he’s taken in by a group of nickering penguins? And for heaven’s sake, someone wipe the occasional white bit of spit off the corner of Daniel Day Lewis’s mouth and shave that pubic, mountain man beard off him. Are you sure we can’t get Jack Wagner from “General Hospital?”

Because I was busy watching and re-watching “Back to the Future II” and “Troop Beverly Hills” when it was released, it’s taken this long to see the classic “My Left Foot.” For some reason, in 1989, someone thought it was a better idea to take me to see “Weekend at Bernie’s” than “UHF.” (The ’80s were crazy.) More likely, it was distaste. Who would want to see a probably tragic tale about the impoverished 1930s upbringing of someone with cerebral palsy?

Oh, but this movie’s fantastic. When the young Christy Brown, muscles frozen in a rictus, lips mashed together, grabs a piece of chalk and writes “mother” on the ground, and his father hoists him to his shoulder like a hero, announcing to the world, “This is Christy Brown! My son! Genius!” When he’s rejected by a girl and his brother silently shakes his fist at her through a window? Or how about when he lashes out at the man he’s just found out is marrying the woman he loves?

“Touch it,” Christy says, referring to his whiskey, “and I’ll kick you in the only part of your anatomy that’s animated.” He adds, to the woman, “I’ve had nothing but platonic love all my life. Do you know what I say? Fuck Plato!”

And then, there’s the scene where he starts a joyous riot, after a man insults him in a pub. “I don’t fight cripples,” the man sniffs. From his wheelchair, Christy kicks, shattering the man’s glass in a “Road House”-style one-punch knockout.

The genre of movies about main characters with disabilities is what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might’ve called a granfalloon — a meaningless grouping, in which we could include everything from the fabulous “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” to the unfortunate blockbuster of the granfalloon, “Forrest Gump.” Compared with “My Left Foot,” “Forrest Gump” — Tom Hanks’ always superb acting aside — is a compromised mental minstrel show, so sanitized it squeaks. Forrest Gump is a Dr Pepper-slugging village idiot with some redeeming Mr. Rogers qualities. Christy Brown is an artist tortured in an unconventional way, but he’s as sharp as the straight razor he tries to slash his wrist with. Instead of platitudes about chocolates, Christy Brown exults in swear words. And he may use a straw, but his drink of choice is whiskey.

There’s a scene in “My Left Foot” where Christy, a teenager, a makeshift goalie in a makeshift back-alley game of soccer, successfully blocks a ball and gets roughed up by the kicker, earning a penalty kick. He’s helped into a standing position, but gloriously smashes into the ball with no assistance, his dominant foot supremely strong. That’s what the filmmakers did. They put the story on the screen, but it scored by its own power alone.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.