In David Michod’s latest film, Christy, Sydney Sweeney embodies the title role with ferocity and conviction. “Maybe it’s true,” she narrates between punches in the prologue. “Maybe I have demons inside of me.” The line, delivered mid-fight, encapsulates the film’s theme: a woman’s relentless pursuit of triumph amid the toils of tragedy.
Sweeney plays Christy Martin, the trailblazing boxer who in the 1990s put women’s boxing on the map — creating the product, cultivating the audience, and forcing the sport to take her seriously. The cultural landscape then was nothing like today’s ESPN-boosted WNBA; Martin had everything working against her. Known to many for Euphoria, Sweeney herself has wrestled with being taken seriously by an audience inclined to ogle. Like every generational sex symbol, from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox, she has had to fight the perception of her body as her only credential. Christy is her bid for liberation from that gaze.
And she succeeds. Sweeney gained over 30 pounds of muscle for the role, adopting the bearing and gait of a natural fighter from a West Virginia coal-mining family — worlds away from the Californian vocal fry of Euphoria. That she remains utterly magnetic, without a single scene in lingerie or less, is a testament to her range. The transformation recalls Margot Robbie’s I, Tonya; Robbie likewise fought to be taken seriously by an audience that only saw her for her body.
Yet as commanding as Sweeney is, the film’s most haunting performance comes from Ben Foster as boxing coach Jim Martin. When Christy first walks into his dingy gym, Foster’s Martin seems to smell vulnerability, assigning her a sparring partner and quietly instructing him to “crack a few ribs.” When Christy comfortably knocks the man cold instead, his eyes widen with opportunity. “I can make you the greatest female fighter in the world,” he promises.
Michod’s screenplay captures the tragedy of a woman with determination but no blueprint. “Compared to who? Nobody’s doing it,” Christy retorts. Even the training montages — boxing biopic genre clichés by nature — gain poignancy when you notice she’s studying male fighters because there were no women to emulate.
Martin trains her, promotes her, and soon begins to control her. The professional partnership metastasizes into a marriage of domination and abuse. Foster’s menace is so complete that when he snarls, “I’ll kill you if you leave me,” you don’t question why Christy doesn’t run straight to the police. It’s an unnerving feat that Foster makes Ike Turner look like Mr. Darcy by comparison.
The film also exposes the social constraints that trapped Christy. Despite Christy’s romantic attraction to women, her mother — horrified by the notion and the scandal it might cause — urges her to stay with Martin even after hearing of his violence. “You’ll ruin everything,” she pleads. These are the demons Christy speaks of in the opening; the accumulated trauma of a woman doing everything she can to stay in everyone’s good graces.
The boxing sequences, choreographed with precision, also work to animate and exude that repression. Every punch and jab feels heavier, sharper, more desperate than her opponents’. “You work harder than most of the men I train,” Martin admits early on, and it’s true — whatever anguish she suffers outside the ring, inside it, Christy channels it into sheer combustion.
For all his cruelty, Martin does propel her into the spotlight — if only because her victories enrich him. The film peaks with her meeting the flamboyant promoter Don King (a brief but scene-stealing portrayal by Chad L. Coleman). When the VHS reel of her highlights fails to play, Christy throws off her coat and begins shadowboxing in King’s office. The sheer vitality of the moment earns her a spot on the same card as Mike Tyson, making history as the first woman to fight on pay-per-view.
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Through it all, Michod resists the easy empowerment slogans that could have softened Christy’s grit. She doesn’t want to be narrowly framed as a mascot for feminism; she wants to be judged by her talent and tenacity. “Don’t watch me because I’m a woman,” she insists. “Watch me because I can fight.”
What emerges is a portrait of perseverance and passion. It’s often said that hard times create strong men, but sometimes they forge even stronger women. Christy is both an emotional rollercoaster and a bruising testament to the demons that forged a legend.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.