In 2019, a film about the life of Gholamreza Takhti (1930–1968), the champion wrestler from south Tehran, hit cinema screens across Iran. The popularity it enjoyed, the discussions about the past and present it triggered, and the forms of nostalgia it provoked underlined Takhti’s unique position in popular and intellectual conceptions of javānmardi and authenticity. His status as a national hero emerged from below during the Pahlavi period: ‘He enjoyed great popularity and respect in Iran amongst many sections of society – university students, merchants, large and small, the regular people and illiterate and semi-literate people’, stressed Sadegh Zibakalam, a public intellectual and professor of history at Tehran University, in a wide-ranging discussion published in the newspaper Shargh between him and its editor on the nostalgic imagery surrounding Takhti at the time of the film’s release.