“What’s a pretty girl like you,” asks Don King, the all-time boxing promoter played by Chad L. Coleman, “doing getting punched in the face?” Christy isn’t just a star vehicle for Sydney Sweeney —it’s a chance to prove her toughness, perhaps her mettle as a method actor. “Because I’m good at it,” Christy replies, setting herself up to become the most famous female boxer of the millennium. Sweeney takes a chance on obvious awards season bait here in playing legendary boxer Christy Martin (now Salters), once nicknamed “the Coal Miner’s Daughter,” who across her career tallied 31 knockouts and revolutionized women’s boxing. In 1996, Martin fought Deidre Gogarty on the same card as Mike Tyson, a bout that drastically shifted the reception of female boxers, and ended with her on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Her career as a boxer spanned 21 tumultuous years, skyrocketing Christy from rural West Virginia onto the biggest of stages, but was almost ended by a tragic episode of domestic violence. Christy Salters is a survivor, a fighter, and now her story is immortalized in… standard biopic fashion.
Sweeney, who turned in a fine performance earlier this year in Eden, was certainly up for the challenge of portraying a champion boxer. She performs admirably on the punching bag, displays a youthful grit during sparring matches, and exudes anger and charisma in the ring. Much of her transformation, and perhaps an impression of dedication, is achieved via her roughly chopped, short dark hair, much changed from the long blonde audiences have become accustomed to in the likes of Euphoria, Americana, and Anyone but You. But not unlike Margot Robbie’s performance as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, Sweeney’s role as Martin requires attitude rather than impersonation. Living as we are amid a streak of high-profile, true-life renditions aiming for cultural veracity — A Complete Unknown (2024), Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025), the upcoming Michael — there’s something refreshing about Sweeney’s ability to embody an attitude, as opposed to an obsessive recreation of tics and outfits.
Even without intimate knowledge of Martin’s career, her appearance, or the sound of her voice, there remain glaring obstacles to the verisimilitude of the film, which covers the years between 1989 and 2012. Especially because the film transports us instantly from ’89 to ’03, the arc of Sweeney’s performance feels intangible, unbelievable. In 2003, as she prepares to fight Laila Ali, it’s difficult to view Sweeney as a 14-year professional boxer with 49 fights under her belt. The film also does odd things with the rest of its cast, choosing to age up Ben Foster and Merritt Wever to play Jim Martin, Christy’s husband, and Joyce Salters, her mother, respectively. This duo serves as the villainous backbone of the film. Jim is Christy’s possessive, insecure trainer-turned-husband, and in the role Foster musters a caustic, gouty, and supremely vile presence, topped by a toupee. Wever, meanwhile, whispers her way through nearly the entire film, delivering backhanded admonitions born of her cruel conservative values.
Christy gives the impression of a classic “rise and fall” picture, but delivers few of the goods. An obvious point of superficial reference might be Raging Bull, but Christy predictably lacks any of the raw drama that Martin Scorsese made exhibition of. While verisimilitude needn’t be a deciding factor of a biographical film’s worth, dramatic catharsis must then exist in that absence. Christy hems and haws on this count, but ultimately adheres to a regressive trend in contemporary film: the assumption that audiences don’t want to listen to characters expressing what they think or feel. “Show, don’t tell,” that eternal and sage screenwriting advice, has begun to do lasting damage in leading films not just away from pronouncement, but from development. There’s rich material here to mine — of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage; a woman plagued by a romantic attachment with a friend, Rosie (Jess Gabor), that was scorned by her intolerant family; a woman forced into a pink-robed femininity by a jealous, judgmental husband — but little is meaningfully developed. Throughout Christy, characters seem ready to bare their souls, to get right down to the nitty-gritty, but then we leave off, and too little exists otherwise to communicate the necessary interiority to better sell this.
Director David Michôd steers neatly toward a vapid, simplistic style — the stock style of the contemporary biopic — that simultaneously centers the performers, amping up their most actorly tendencies, while neglecting them via a prevailing blandness. In stark contrast to the earth-shattering montage of Raging Bull or the moody chiaroscuro of Million Dollar Baby, Christy has little to offer beyond its checklist of narrative and biographical details. While several of the boxing scenes do manage to be among the most compelling in the film, they never threaten to approach the formal wizardry of Scorsese or Ali (2001) or even Creed 3 (2023), and instead testify more heartily about how little else there is to hang onto here. Boxing, with its combination of brutal violence and careful choreography, has proven to be arguably the most cinematic of sports, and though it’s perhaps unfair to expect the medium to make strides with each new boxing flick, if the sport isn’t rendered sublime, then the drama simply can’t be as unforgettable as it is in Christy. What elevation Michôd does achieve in these sequences is largely thanks to music choices: the titular pugilist’s first big fight, the paradigm-shifting bout against Gogarty, is soundtracked by somber choral music that reaches toward such necessary sublimity, while earlier fights, rough brawls in cinderblock gyms and dusty motor speedways, are pumped through with the punk energy of Christy’s youth. But apart from its soundtrack choices, the film does little with the rich potential of the boxing ring. The occasional use of slow motion, a rolling shutter, perhaps a jilting freeze frame — these techniques work well enough in the moment, but they offer little more than a vague impression of boxing cinema’s past.
Neither jaw-dropping historical epic of sports cinema, nor captivating drama, Christy is the worst of both worlds: boring. Though occasionally moving in its treatment of Christy’s traumas and struggles, and her triumphant survival, it ultimately folds under the weight of its own force-of-nature central character. Sweeney doesn’t step quite far enough out of her own shadow to fully inhabit Martin, Michôd’s direction leaves much to be desired, and the potential for kinetic, even musical, movement in realizing the sport on screen is drowned in a repetition of flat, lifeless scenes. Christy might well garner some of the accolades of awards season, but like so many of its bland biopic ilk, it soon won’t be remembered.
DIRECTOR: David Michôd; CAST: Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Katy O’Brian, Jess Gabor, Ethan Embry; DISTRIBUTOR: Black Bear Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 7; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 15 min.
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