Christy (2025)
David Michôd’s biographical drama about pioneering female boxer Christy Martin delivers a solid portrait of talent meeting tenacity, even if the film sometimes can’t quite decide what kind of story it wants to tell. Sydney Sweeney’s fierce central performance and the sheer force of Martin’s real-life experiences carry the day, though not without some stumbling in the earlier rounds.
We follow Martin from her origins as a small-town West Virginia basketball player to becoming the most recognisable face in 1990s women’s boxing. Local coach Jim Martin (Ben Foster) spots her natural ability at a boxing competition, and she trades collegiate sport for the ring. As her career takes off, her professional success becomes hopelessly entangled with Jim, who evolves from coach to husband to something considerably more sinister. The film tracks their relocation to Florida, her career peak, a bruising loss to Laila Ali, and the slow-motion collapse of both her marriage and sense of self. It all builds towards a 2010 incident that finally shattered the public persona she’d been maintaining for years.
Michôd, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mirrah Foulkes, grasps that Martin’s real fights happened outside the ropes. The smartest thing the film does is recognise this as fundamentally a story about identity under siege and autonomy gradually surrendered. In the 1990s, Martin was navigating multiple hostile territories at once: a sport that barely tolerated women, a family drenched in religious judgment about her sexuality, and a marriage that slowly transmuted affection into domination. When the film finds its footing, it examines how different systems of control operate, whether they’re enforced through family expectation, social prejudice, or intimate violence. Even the strongest fighter can end up caged.
Sweeney commits fully, both physically and emotionally. She captures Martin’s swagger and drive but also, crucially, the bone-deep weariness of maintaining different versions of yourself for different audiences. It’s exhausting work, being whoever everyone else needs you to be. Foster matches her intensity as Jim, refusing the easy route of pure villainy in favour of something more disturbing: a man whose compulsion to control wears the mask of devotion. Merritt Wever does what she can with an underwritten role as Martin’s disapproving mother, though the character never really escapes the orbit of repetitive judgment.
The film’s main problem is structural indecision. Michôd seems torn between making a boxing career chronicle and excavating a survivor’s testimony, and the first two acts pay the price for this uncertainty. The early fight sequences lack bite, both viscerally and visually. They feel obligatory rather than illuminating. When the film eventually pivots to focus on Martin’s psychological captivity in the third act, it discovers genuine power. Getting there, however, takes longer than feels necessary across a 135-minute runtime.
Katy O’Brian makes a strong impression in her brief appearances as Lisa Holewyne, generating a connection with Sweeney that hints at depths the film frustratingly chooses not to explore. You get the sense of a more nuanced, complex story waiting just beneath the surface, a film willing to spend proper time with Martin’s suppressed identity rather than merely acknowledging it between bouts.
What pulls “Christy” back from the merely adequate is the accumulated weight of its subject’s life and Sweeney’s determination to honour that life properly. This is a story about what it costs to perform strength for a world that simultaneously demands and resents female power. About what happens when the roles we’re assigned become our prisons. About finding the courage to reclaim your own narrative. Michôd doesn’t always navigate the smoothest path through this terrain, but he arrives at the destination.
The film works best when it trusts Martin’s story to carry its own drama without excessive polish. The final act, though arguably drawn out longer than needed, lands with genuine emotional weight. Sometimes survival is the most radical act available, even if recognising that truth takes more time than you’d like.
In my opinion, Christy is a film that succeeds despite itself. The conventional sports biopic framework keeps threatening to flatten the more interesting psychological story trying to break through. But Sweeney’s performance and the inherent power of Martin’s experience win out. It’s not the knockout it could have been, but it’s a definite victory on points.