‘Christy’ Review: Sydney Sweeney’s Boxer Biopic Has Familiar Filmmaking Genes but a Captivating Central Story of Perseverance [B] TIFF

It’s easy to look at Christy, the new boxing biopic from journeyman director David Michôd, and expect the most formulaic story: a scrappy fighter from rural West Virginia rises through the ranks to become such a star that she legitimizes women’s boxing as a mainstream sport. Christy is partly that movie. But if you aren’t expecting the emotional hostage situation and violence that shape this film’s narrative, then you don’t know the story of Christy Martin.

On November 23, 2010, Martin’s longtime manager and husband attempted to murder her after years of emotional and physical abuse. In documenting the circumstances that led to that night, Michôd and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes try to balance several cinematic templates while exploring the roots of maltreatment, exploitation, and prejudice that kept Martin tied to her husband, James “Jim” V. Martin (played by Ben Foster). They also don’t shy away from Martin’s own self-interest and ego at the height of her career. The film argues that many of her more unpleasant qualities — especially her lack of support for other women in sports — stemmed from living in a reality where she was constantly cornered. In one interview scene, Sydney Sweeney’s Christy bluntly states that advancing the legitimacy of women’s boxing doesn’t make her a feminist. Later, her opponent-turned-trainer Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian) asks her: “Do you know how easy you make it for people to dislike you?”

The success of this dichotomy comes from how clearly Michôd portrays Martin’s early years under the controlling hands of male managers and promoters like Jim and Don King (Chad L. Coleman), as well as the indignities she faced for her queer identity and romantic relationships with women. Not helping matters is her own mother, Joyce (Merritt Wever), who delivers constant put-downs and refuses to believe her daughter’s accounts of abuse once Jim becomes violent. Christy does not cast blame on its subject—on the contrary, the film shows how a conservative, misogynist culture cultivated an environment that forced Christy to go on the offensive at every turn and, paradoxically, left her on the back foot years into a dangerous relationship.

For her part, Sweeney finds an authentic truthfulness in her portrayal, balancing Martin’s world-renowned success with the bleak conflicts of her later career. She may look slightly ridiculous sporting Martin’s distinct mullet, but she bears the knotty weight behind a performance that roots Christy’s vanity in her pain. Foster is strong as well, evolving Jim from a one-note monster into something more recognizably repellant: first presenting Christy with opportunities, then weaponizing his role in her career to keep her caged. His shift from put-on decency to raging breakdown feels credible. When he tells Christy early on, “If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you,” it’s seemingly a joke but acts as ominous foreshadowing. When he says the same thing later on, you know he means it.

For as much as the script neatly scrutinizes a harmful, regressive culture that Martin is victimized by, its more traditional beats hit their targets with a conventional sense of obligation. Christy dots its clichéd rise-and-fall narrative with nice character-based specificity, but watching Martin escape her run-down town and achieve newfound fulfillment via standard training montages and boxing sequences offers a tedious sense of déjà vu. Maybe it’s the ceiling placed on sports movies, given how reliable a formula they follow, but Christy doesn’t do much to bring life to its atmosphere visually either, settling for basic coverage of fights and quieter drama you’d expect in any garden-variety sports film. It gets the job done without much fanfare, though it does achieve an upsetting jolt in its stark depiction of the brutality Christy endured.

If nothing else, Christy is simultaneously respectful and honest about its subject in a way that could have been easily distorted in any other version of this story, either leaning too heavily into an uncomplicated hagiography of a woman who faced terrible violence and a reactionary culture, or losing the appropriate balance of how Christy’s spite and abuse are rooted in the same place. It’s exceedingly familiar filmmaking, and it ends up verbalizing its themes far too heavily in its final moments, rather than letting Christy’s story speak for itself. But there’s an undeniable quality to both Sweeney’s performance and the fact that Martin’s story deepens a filmmaking blueprint in a way that upgrades this from an undemanding biopic to the sobering story of a woman who had to fight her own way out of suffering.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where Christy had its world premiere. Black Bear will release the film theatrically in the U.S. this fall.