By John Corrado
Christy is Australian director David Michôd’s gruelling sports biopic of boxer Christy Martin, a pioneer in the sport of female boxing. Michôd doesn’t fully escape the expected biopic beats. But his film is an emotionally charged one, built around two very strong performances from Sydney Sweeney, who is excellent as Christy, and Ben Foster, who is deeply unsettling as her trainer and husband Jim Martin
The film follows Christy from her humble West Virginia beginnings as a coal miner’s daughter. She enters a tough woman competition for fun, gets noticed as a promising young fighter, and is sent to train with Jim, who at first doesn’t want to train a girl. But he is convinced. The relationship between Christy and Jim becomes the main focus of the film. While Christy’s boxing career takes off and catapults her into the limelight, the two get married, and he begins to have more of a stranglehold over her life.
When Michôd’s film stops being a standard boxing movie, and becomes domestic drama, a whole new layer is revealed to Sweeney’s powerful performance. Make no mistakes, the sequences in the ring here are strong and proficiently crafted, with Sweeney having trained and gaining thirty pounds to play a fighter. But it’s in the dramatic character scenes, when Michôd offers an unflinching but never exploitative depiction of intimate partner violence, that Christy feels most vital.
It becomes a film about survival and escape, as Sweeney’s Christy fights to survive in more ways than one. It’s an arc that the young actress handles impeccably well through a range of different emotional scenes, with one incredible and visceral sequence in particular that will surely come to define her still-fresh film career. It’s also fascinating to watch Foster, who is becoming quite the chameleon, transform into the role of Jim, especially in moments when he unnervingly morphs into a dead-eyed monster capable of extreme cruelty.
The film also finds space for a more nuanced look at identity. Christy is lesbian, but has to remain closeted and hide her sexuality, initially due to her mother (Merritt Wever) and then for the sake of her career in the 1990s. The film showcases her close dynamic with two female friends; Sherry Lusk (Jess Gabor), a teammate on her high school basketball team, and fellow boxer Lisa Holewyne (a scene-stealing Katy O’Brien). Sweeney shares strong chemistry with both.
This is Sweeney’s show, proving she is not just the girl with “great jeans” in the American Eagle ad (though she is that as well so nothing against the ad itself), delivering a fierce but emotional performance. This is her punching above her weight to become a movie star. If it turns into a “star is born” moment for her career, it will be fully deserved.
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