The most brutal moments in “Christy” — the biopic about the boxer Christy Martin, played by Sydney Sweeney — don’t take place in a ring. Instead, one unfolds early on at a dining table in West Virginia, where a mother’s shame about her daughter’s sexuality poisons a meal. The other unfurls when — after a career that would land Martin on the cover of Sports Illustrated — marital menace turns to staggering violence in the Florida ranch home of Martin and her manager-husband, Jim (Ben Foster).
This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point. With a mix of ferocity and finesse, Martin, clad in pink satin trunks and nicknamed “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” finds her self-determination in the ring. (“I think I found my thing,” she sweetly raves on the phone to her soon-to-be ex-girlfriend.) Outside of it, she’s is increasingly controlled by Jim Martin, who began as her grudging trainer.
Perhaps foreshadowing what’s to come, the two meet ugly. As a high school athlete, Christy won a Toughman Contest in West Virginia, and a promoter approached her about working with Martin in Tennessee. When Christy (nee Salters) arrives at the boxing gym in Tennessee, her mother and Pomeranian dog in tow, Martin whisper-instructs another boxer to hurt her. “Huh,” he says watching from ringside after Christy decks the sparring partner.
It’s just the first in a career of knockouts. And at times, the film seems to revisit each of them through the sports film’s bread and butter: montages and thumping music. To his credit, Michôd seldom resorts to slow-motion, in-the-ring close-ups, instead letting the hectic, brute energy of the fights rule the scenes.
In the tradition of Robert De Niro (“Raging Bull”) and Will Smith (“Ali”), Sweeney bulked up to play the pugilist, who boxed as a 5’4” super welterweight. A practitioner of MMA fighting and grappling, Sweeney also did her own stunts. She settles into Christy’s heft but never overthinks her character, whose innate skills are decades ahead of her self-esteem. Jim Martin, too, operates on instinct. An amalgam of chauvinistic contempt and clumsy calculation, he sports a paunch, thinning hair and leisure couture. It’s hardly a surprise when Jim, 25 years older, pits Christy’s love of women against her love of the sport.
The writing was a collaborative effort by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes, a couple. The movie treats sport as the cultural microcosm it so often is. As her win total rises, Christy’s trash talk gets bolder: launching a homophobic jab here, a misogynistic hook there. Part of this is calibrated performance: what she believes she must do to have a career. But Christy’s judgmental and later complicit mother and loving, passive father (Ethan Embry) make her feel like being a lesbian isn’t an option.
Part-way through a film that at more than two hours goes a few rounds too long, a career-altering, landmark meeting of Christy, Jim and the fight promoter Don King (Chad Coleman, having too much fun) acts as a wink shared with the audience: King, too, knows what type of man Jim is. Who knew Don King might become a feminist-adjacent avatar? Huh.
Christy
Rated R for language, violence, bloody images, some drug use and sexual material. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.
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