The French were right.

The French were right to warn us about Iraq. And now it seems that they may even have been right about Mickey Rourke.

When Mr. Rourke won a Golden Globe award for “The Wrestler” last Sunday, that comeback within a comeback movie was not merely a vindication for an aging, underemployed, sometimes mocked but mostly forgotten movie star.

It was a needling reminder that the French, after so many years and after so much derision, never gave up on an actor who, in this country, became a living symbol of French contrariness — a human Security Council veto, the Tinseltown embodiment of the force de frappe and fromage de tête.

We mocked the French for admiring Mickey Rourke the way we laughed at their serious assessment of Jerry Lewis

as a comic genius. In both cases, the French despised us right back for disparaging artists who are avatars of what they consider to be the best of American popular culture.

They never saw Mr. Rourke as a wash-up; or rather, they quite liked that about him. The actor’s unpopularity in his own land made the French admire him all the more. For decades, or at least since one of his bigger belly flops (“Wild Orchid,” 1989), he was their Hollywood Dreyfus Affair — an honorable man persecuted and falsely accused of failure, which here is almost as bad as treason.

Failure in America is a recipe for success in France, a nation that takes perverse pride in marching out of step with the leader of the free world. France, after all, elected its first American-style president — Nicolas Sarkozy is a first-generation immigrant, a free-market capitalist with a sexy model/pop singer wife and no grandes écoles diplomas — just as America is readying to swear in its first French-style president. Barack Obama, after all, is an elegant, well-spoken technocrat who went to all the right schools, has a sophisticated, soignée first lady and is promoting more state control of the economy.

The French contrarian streak became clear many years ago when an editor at The New York Times Magazine asked me to find out why so many bad Mickey Rourke movies were playing all the time, all over Paris — this in the early ’90s, after “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.” The editor couldn’t understand why the French loved and took seriously an actor who despite early promise (“Diner,” “Rumble Fish”) and a youthful James Dean-like beauty, had become an asterisk, or worse, a plastic surgery punch line.

Once I started reporting, I found so much more to the French obsession with Mr. Rourke that the assignment found its way onto the cover: “Can 50 Million Frenchmen Be Wrong?”

Apparently, no.

“The Wrestler,” directed by Darren Aronofsky in a European new-realist style, will not open in French theaters until February, but it won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and French critics in particular raved about Mr. Rourke.

“More of a freak than ever, more impressive as well, he is the physical incarnation of the American landscape, its dreams, its violence, its loneliness and we only come to realize this every three years, each time he attempts a comeback,” is how Philippe Azoury, of Libération, put it in September. (Who here even knew Mr. Rourke has a new movie every three years?)

Mr. Azoury had still more to say. “What he gives here, physically, in terms of wacko masochism (wrestling with broken glass, staple gun and barbed wire) as well as spattered sensitivity, is without equal."

Not that the French didn’t get a few things wrong before they were right. In 1985, Les Cahiers du Cinéma hailed Michael Cimino’s “Year of the Dragon” as a masterpiece and raved about Mr. Rourke’s performance most of all, noting approvingly that he alone stands out from the pack of “steroid-fattened and lobotomized” Hollywood leading men.

A few years later, Mr. Rourke fell into a self-destructive physical-improvement spiral that included bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery so dire that even now, in “The Wrestler,” his eyes stare pleadingly out of what looks like a mask of hardened lava and plumber’s caulk. The Times critic A. O. Scott put it more kindly when he wrote that Mr. Rourke “doesn’t look like a movie star playing a battered wreck, but like the genuine article.”

It should also be pointed out that his American comeback is not actually official. Foreign journalists — members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — select Golden Globe winners, and while their picks sometimes presage the Oscars, sometimes they don’t. (Pia Zadora won the 1982 Golden Globe for best new actress.)

Still, the French can gloat over the fact that “The Wrestler” opened in American theaters (other Rourke films have been shown only overseas), is doing respectably at the box office and won the actor high praise from even the most discerning critics.

And accordingly, it’s not inconceivable that Mr. Rourke’s comeback in Hollywood could invite a backlash across the ocean. There are already a few signs. After the film won at Venice and was picked up by an American distributor, it was featured at the Toronto International Film Festival in October. American critics who saw it there, including Mr. Scott, quite liked it.

And that’s when some French critics began to find fault. “We’re happy for Mickey Rourke,” Philippe Garnier of Libération wrote from the New York Film Festival in October, in a pan that clashed with his colleague’s earlier assessment. “But this sentimental and badly made film is not even ‘Rocky.’ ”

If history is any guide, Mr. Garnier is absolutely right.