Christy review: Sydney Sweeney hits hard in boxing biopic

Of the many notable names connected to Christy – such as boxer Christy Salters Martin, the film’s subject; star Sydney Sweeney; actors Ben Foster and Merritt Wever in support; Don King, who is featured as a character; and a smattering of other sporting figures – Australian filmmakers David Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes are the most telling regarding the biopic’s thematic substance.

Michôd, who penned and directed one of the great debut Australian films with Animal Kingdom, has long been drawn to complicated imbalances of power, including in close relationships. Humanity’s capacity for darkness lingers across his The Rover and The King-filled road to Christy, too.

Foulkes added her own exceptional first effort to Australian cinema via Judy & Punch, where an abusive, exploitative marriage sat front and centre, as did a woman’s battle to fight back.

The real-life partners’ initial feature together as co-scribes, with Michôd helming, is a clear continuation for both, then – even as it proves a purposefully familiar underdog sports portrait, plus a successful showcase for Sweeney’s dramatic talents. (Fellow true tale Reality, about intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner, remains the Euphoria, The White Lotus, Anyone But You and The Housemaid talent’s best big-screen performance, but this is a firm second).

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Christy: celebrating a champion

Sweeney’s task in Christy: to portray the movie’s namesake, aka “the coal miner’s daughter”, on her journey from a college basketballer who enters her maiden amateur boxing bout for fun and the $300 prize, to a super welterweight world champion with decades of throwing jabs, hooks and crosses behind her. Martin’s achievements include being the first female boxer on Sports Illustrated’s cover and the first woman signed by King. As she spouts to anyone listening as her fame grows, she’s also a key reason that women’s boxing in the US began earning significant media attention.

Martin finds her calling in the ring, she gushes to her girlfriend Rosie (Jess Gabor) after she starts competing in small-time professional bouts. Hers is a tale of pain beyond gloved uppercuts, however. It’s equally the story of the fortitude needed to navigate heartbreaking and sometimes life-threatening knockouts off the canvas.

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Michôd and Foulkes’ screenplay opens its linear retelling in 1989, when a Sunday lunch with Christy’s mother Joyce (Wever) and father Johnny (Ethan Embry) turns frosty over gossip about her romance with Rosie, and when the buzz of her initial win leads her to trainer Jim Martin (Foster). Both incidents forever alter Christy’s path.

As the feature makes plain in voiceover from the outset (one of its heaviest-handed touches), boxing is an outlet for the West Virginia-born woman raised to be a good southern girl and told repeatedly that she should be anyone but her true self.

The picture’s premise-summarising first line: ‘Somebody once told me I fought like I was trying to destroy everyone who’d ever done me wrong.’

Christy: sports biopic meets survival drama

To the watching world, over the bulk of her career Martin was a pink-clad pugilist under Martin’s watch, as well as a dutiful wife to him; a glass ceiling-shattering pioneer who rejected feminism and the idea that she was paving the way for other women; an eager trash-talker unashamed of taunting her opponents.

That’s the facade, with Christy as much a survival drama as a sports biopic. In a straightforward yet still emotionally layered fashion, it explores how Martin is shamed and pressured into heteronormativity and feminine stereotypes. She marries a mean-spirited, misogynistic man more than twice her age, and is forced to play up a housewife-who-happens-to-box persona in the spotlight. When she eventually questions her treatment at Jim’s hands, she’s gaslit by her constantly disapproving mother.

There’s nothing revolutionary about the way the film unfurls its story. Not that they deserve even an ounce of sympathy, but the characterisation of the antagonists in Christy’s orbit is especially one-note, leaving little that Foster and Wever can do to impart Jim and Joyce with depth.

In Martin’s life, and also in the movie bringing her professional and personal highs and lows to the screen, a pivotal message punches through – albeit not with its villainous figures: how a person or narrative is packaged, and what truly beats within them, are rarely the same thing.

Christy: Sweeney, Michôd and Foulkes hit hard

Christy’s existence demonstrates this fact again and again, whether she’s visibly revelling in inhabiting the part she’s been pushed into – she’s a livewire in pre-bout press conferences – or desperately trying to hide her aching for a different existence. The eyes have it, in Sweeney’s case. Frequently darting and always alert for the next blow and brawl no matter where it might spring from, her gaze blazes not only with Martin’s competitive spirit but with fierce determination and unyielding yearning.

While overwhelming awards love hasn’t come Sweeney’s way, despite boxing movies offering a well-trodden route to accolades (see: Rocky’s best picture win; Robert De Niro for Raging Bull; Hilary Swank, who Christy namechecks, with Million Dollar Baby; Christian Bale for The Fighter), the film gains plenty of its passion and spark from her committed and captivating performance.

Christy hits much that’s standard in the boxing genre, including Sweeney’s physically transformative contribution – the type involving weight gain, wigs and coloured contact lenses – alongside an over-reliance on montages and easy needle drops, and a love of its star’s bloodied face. There’s meaning behind Michôd sticking to a template, however.

Shrewdly probing as it charts a recognisable arc, his screenplay with Foulkes repeatedly asks how and why someone so formidable in the ring can’t protect herself out of it, and also emphasises that domestic abuse and control never discriminates. Nothing less should be expected of Christy’s guiding forces, given their previous work.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest surprise is the movie’s tenderness at times, aided by a scene-stealing Katy O’Brian as fellow boxer Lisa Holewyne, plus Bryan Hibbard and Gilbert Cruz playing members of Martin’s support team. Christy knows how to sting, and also how to float.

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