Christy: Lacklustre boxing drama does a disservice to its subject
The life of trailblazing LGBTQ+ American boxer Christy Martin has all the makings of a great movie, but Sydney Sweeney’s performance doesn’t capture Martin’s complexity, and the end result feels like a stale simulacrum of more successful sports biopics.
To those unfamiliar with the sensational true story of Christy Martin – the pioneering lesbian welterweight whose successes helped legitimise women’s boxing in the eyes of the American public – David Michod’s new biopic Christy may feel like mediocre fiction. Drab streamer-friendly aesthetics and desultory plotting add to a lack of authenticity as the film traces Martin’s journey from her ‘coal miner’s daughter’ roots in West Virginia to an illustrious stint as the reigning champ in her field.
At the film’s midpoint, when Christy’s familiar ascension to success and notoriety irreversibly sours, it becomes clear why this is a story that merits telling as a drama. As her coach, manager, and husband James Martin (Ben Foster, nearly unrecognisable beneath prosthetics and a combover) turns from subtly controlling to sadistically abusive, a typical rise-and-fall narrative becomes a story of peril and perseverance.
In spite of her evident grit, Christy’s fame isn’t achieved on her own terms. She trashes her opponents, pointedly dispels the notion that she seeks to empower women through the sport, and peddles the public image of a traditional housewife who just so happens to be a boxer. The film does little to dramatise these strains of internalised misogyny and homophobia other than cut back to their implied source: a brooding, contemptible husband, capable of only one facial expression. When Christy survives his violent abuse, she reassesses the terms of her fame and regains control of her life as a newly empowered queer woman.
Through all of this turbulence, Christy plays like a stale simulacrum of better sports biopics, wearing its various textures – production design, 1980s costumes, and even performances – like half-hearted cosplay.
Sweeney’s laboured portrayal of Martin’s real-life struggle is enough to distance the viewer, but she also brings contextual baggage to the role, given the recent furore over her involvement in the ‘Great Jeans’ campaign for American Eagle and her 2024 Republican voter status. That Sweeney has done little to combat her increasingly conservative image, sidestepping such queries during interviews, seems to clinch the matter. This controversy presents a clash with Christy, a film that purports to champion feminism and gay rights, but Sweeney’s one-note performance disappoints on its own, betraying a surplus of effort and a shortage of dexterity.
The film’s poor box office draw is unsurprising, but aside from Christy’s failure to find purchase with a wide viewership, the film is a disservice to its subject, flattening Martin’s biopic into a widely-publicised failure of brand management for its producer-star.
► Christy is in UK cinemas now.