Director: David Michod
Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Merritt Weaver, Katy O’Brien
Screenplay: Mirrah Foulkes, David Michod
135 mins. Rated R for language, violence/bloody images, some drug use and sexual material.

Christy is the second major combat sports biopic of the year, following The Smashing Machine. Whereas the Mark Kerr biopic failed to make me understand the importance of its story, Christy is a sports film and a biopic with a number of elements I hadn’t quite seen before, especially in the way director David Michod (The King) organized it all for the screen. It’s a hard-hitting, often intense story that deserves to be told.

Christy Salters (Sydney Sweeney, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) is a blunt-force weapon in the ring. Starting as a teenager just looking to earn some cash to start a life, she earned her title as The Coal Miner’s Daughter and made a name for herself in the early days of Women’s Boxing. She soon found herself under the tutelage of boxing coach Jim Martin (Ben Foster, X-Men: The Last Stand), and the two eventually married. Over the years, though, Christy would begin to question Jim’s skills as a manager, coach, and husband, and Jim was unwilling to give up any control over her.

On its surface, there are more than a few traditional elements of sports biopics at play with Christy, but the film is elevated by some great performances, a tight screenplay, and some solid underplayed boxing direction. Sydney Sweeney is solid in the lead role, and director/co—writer David Michod gives her plenty to work with. There’s a sequence where she’s being interviewed about her extraordinary skills in the role and she says she’s just a regular woman who knocks people out for a living, and the delivery here makes Christy an extremely likable and unique protagonist. She’s not flashy, and she’s not prideful, but she has a skill that can take her places, and she enjoys it.

Sweeney’s surrounded by some great supporting players, most notably Ben Foster playing Jim Martin. With a silly comb-over hairstyle and a gut, Jim comes across initially harmless and comedic, but Foster’s able to slowly peel back the layers of Jim’s menace and ruthless hold on Christy. He doesn’t see Christy as a skill-performer, he only sees where she can take him and his career, and he’s not willing to share, manipulating her initially lowly-situation in the sports world until he has her wrapped around his finger. Merritt Weaver (Marriage Story) also shows up in a minor role as Christy’s mother, and while she’s not in the film very much, she has staying power as a woman who refuses to believe her daughter’s cries for help, chocking all of it up to her blasphemous lifestyle. Katy O’Brien (Twisters) has quickly become one of my favorite performers to see onscreen, and she’s excellent in a very subdued role as Lisa Holewyne, another boxer who enters Christy’s circle several times through the course of the film. Oh, and I’d be heartbroken not to mention Chad Coleman’s pitch-perfect portrayal of Don King.

The screenwriting is pretty tight here, covering a number of time periods, making time jumps with effortless ease and never losing the narrative. We’re able to keep caught up through the screenplay’s use of dramatic irony and foreshadowing, setting events in motion before each time we move ahead in Christy’s story. The writing is clever and allows to see much of Christy Martin’s time in the profession and many of her personal struggles outside, including some truly shocking and harrowing sequences near the end of the film that had me holding my breath.

The boxing scenes are not as flashy as some other boxing films, but what works about Christy’s choreography and shot composition is how unpredictable it makes the various boxing sequences. The camera moves around, almost uncertain of the focus, and there’s isn’t a big emotional buildup to the knockout but instead blows are traded back and forth and we’re never given the clues to fully know where they are going.

There’s a glaring problem with all of these time jumps, though, and it boils down to makeup and hair. There’s very little to actually show character aging in the film, and if it was just a single time jump of six years or so, that wouldn’t matter, but we move through decades with some of these characters, and there needed to be more makeup and hair work to show the proper amount of aging for them.

Christy is an exciting and often unnerving sports biopic of a legend in the world of boxing that I didn’t know anything about. I’m glad to have learned more about the life of Christy Martin, and though it hits a few of the traditional plot beats, David Michod sidesteps some of them by showing us how Christy differed from the pack than any similarities, and these performances made for a terrific and harrowing film experience.

4/5
-Kyle A. Goethe