Christy Saltare (Sydney Sweeney) already feel her way around disguises when her coach (and possible husband) Jim Martin (Ben Foster) presents the growing boxer with a baby pink boxing kit. Boots, shorts, top, it’s all pink, delicate and feminine and sweet and designed to make people others guess what Christy can do in the ring. As long as she has lived, Christy has taken on masks, hid behind personalities, played a character for the one she needs to please. But crucial, Jim’s kit comes hand in hand with something else: Christy’s insight that boxing, even if it requires a little fudge, can really just be her Thing.
It is to put it easy. In David Michôd’s gloomy (and sometimes dark fun and ultimately audience-convenient) Biopian “Christy,” We seem to be following Martin’s rise to the highest echelons of female boxing, while we are really After Martins for Horrible-to-Be-fake life story. It has all catches of the usual true sports drama-high highs! Incredibly low lows! Cracked relationships! Don King! – But Martin’s real story is so Gobsmacking that the boxing aspect of it can only be one aspect of it.
Said clearly, this film If a boxer is mostly about what it takes to be a fighter. And while Michôd always has towards the darkness with his workMartin’s story demands it. This is a sports biopics where the hard workouts are a relief and the big gains cannot hold back the worst monsters of life. Get up and cheer? It is a movie for someone else, although Christy Martin is as inspiring as a person (not just an athlete) and Sweeney is so credible in the role that the film seems to do for great ovations at its conclusion.
It’s a rough road there. When he extends over 20 years of Martin’s life, Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes’ script (with story of Katherine Fugate) lean to the general form of the triumphant sports history – rising talent, dirty path to honor, many adversities, possible great profit – but converts it as a much more common story. A sadly Ordinary story. Without putting one too nice point on it, what “Christy” asks is: What happens if the world’s best female boxers could completely defend themselves outside the ring? As blunt as it may sound, it is the truth in Martin’s story, no matter how difficult it can be to swallow. Real life? No, it’s not like the films, although “Christy” sometimes leans on the usual tropes to drive Christy’s pain and danger to breaking point after having the breaking point.
When he picked up in 1989 and runs straight until 2010, “Christy” it traces the punchy boxer from news (again: pink boxing kit) to the top of the boxing food chain. In the film’s opening Voiceover, Sweeney (with a West Virginian Twang that is never over the top) says that Christy struggled as if she had demons in her, as if she fought everyone who had ever hurt her and fought for her life. She was. Boxing is presented as something Christy likes, something she’s Good AT, and when her star rises and Jim (a boxing coach who claims to have connections to Don King) begins to shape her into her shades, it is easy not to really see what is actually happening here.
Flowering is never quite At Rosen, the idea, when we learn early on that Christy has a girlfriend she likes a lot, even though her family (especially her mother Joyce, played by an outrageous Merritt Wever) is convinced that the gay can pray from both. Christy’s first big costume? Play straight, or straight, ended with Jim because it just seemed easier. But when he consumes Christy’s life, he cannot break her spirit, and he is sure that hell cannot remove her talent.
Sweeney disappears in the role, not only changes her hair color, eye color, accent and ways to move, without her general air, her overall mine, the space she takes up in a room. While the choice to get Sweeney to play Martin for so long (and so filled) a period of her life is sometimes tricky – Sweeney doesn’t see so Different from the ages 21 to 42, as the film requires – the actress fits nicely into Christy’s role in a way that makes it difficult to imagine that someone else is playing it.
While Sweeney, which also produces the film and has made no secret that it is a big passion project for herIs the main draw here, she is supported by a uniformly strong supporting role. Foster, which has always been skilled at producing male fragility in its many forms, is scary here (a compliment). Wever is upsetting (also a compliment). Ethan embry as Christy’s dad is heartbreaking. Chad L. Coleman, like Don “Only in America!” King, is a bit wide, but the spirit he gives to the part lifts the whole movie in his darker moments. And Katy O’Brian? The breakout “Love Lies Bleeding” provides an incredible combination of tenderness and charisma to her role as Christy’s single -time Nemesis Lisa Holewyne.
For all its success as a deeply gloomy story of human endurance, “Christy” boasts some classic battle sequences. Boxing gives a hell of a movie bell, quick and easy to follow, winners obvious, losers clear, lots of blood to waste, and Michôd won’t be careful with his fight scenes. They also offer some of the film’s most optimistic moments, especially early, as Christy loses his competition with a Verve and picking that is contagious. The fact that she is a deeply talented fighter is never questioned, even when the film tries to navigate around the Thornieth points of her personality and tendency.
While “Christy” has long been placed as a price game for Sweeney (such as it or not, being willing to break the legs for a real story seems to just lend to such expectations), her performance here is more nuanced and more painful than early indicators completely released. She is involved in the role, but she is also involved in a story that does not fully fit the usual form. It does not draw punch, although in the end it leaves another kind of brand on its audience.
Rating: B+
“Christy” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. Black Bear releases it in theaters on Friday 7 November.
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