Boxing dramas are a dime a dozen, so it should come as no real shock that David Michôd’s *Christy*—the tale of a lesbian fighter trapped in a heterosexual marriage—does little new with the form. As a sports biopic, it’s functional enough and provides the bare-minimum framework for some lukewarm drama that’s worth leaning back and observing. However, as a performance showcase, it affords Sydney Sweeney the chance to be truly remarkable, even if the film around her rarely is.
Fresh out of college but still in the closet, amateur basketball player Christy Martin, née Salters (Sweeney), is scouted by a local boxing promoter after her one-and-only bout. She decides to give the sport a chance despite the lack of prospects for female athletes. The year is 1989, and her conservative West Virginian parents reject her relationship with her semi-fictionalized sweetheart Rosie (Jess Gabor).
The two are forced apart—at first by their respective families, but then, once Christy takes a liking to the ring and begins carving out a space for herself where none yet exists. The novice brawler also catches the eye of her initially reluctant trainer, Jim Martin (Ben Foster), a divorced man several years her elder, who ensnares her into a marriage of convenience.
And so the decades go: from the ’90s to the 2000s, all the way until 2010. Jim is controlling, but gets Christy just enough fights to get by. Along the way, she puts women’s boxing on the map, while publicly chastising not only her peers, like Katy O’Brian’s measured Lisa Holewyne, but even her benefactors, such as Chad L. Coleman’s hilariously blunt and ostentatious Don King.
The problem with this plot, however, is its utter lack of focus in service of fidelity to the real-life timeline. Christy hops and skips between subplots with reckless abandon and enough fight and training montages to fill an entire boxing franchise. The result is a film that seldom slows down long enough to dig into its characters or to let the more villainous among them—Jim, as well as Christy’s disapproving mother Joyce (Merritt Wever)—grow beyond rote caricature.
Despite being a film of abuse and rigid gendered expectations, a head-scratching amount of discomforting material unfolds off-screen and between the massive timeline jumps. Michôd, despite his ability to stage a premise with verve, rarely stages scenes in the dramatic sense. The camera often lingers on unnecessary details and tends to miss the dramatic ironies right beneath its nose.
Potential points of reflection are entirely missed, such as Christy being forced to perform femininity even in a brutal, masculine sport, as model-thin ring girls traipse in front of her to signal the next round. What does it all mean? Well, nothing much beyond “this happened.”
With little emphasis placed on the dynamics all around her, Sweeney is forced to shoulder the weight of the movie’s drama all on her own—but she’s more than up to the task.
It should be said that the PR-forward narrative of “transformation” in her case, crafted for award purposes, is both entirely retrograde and doesn’t nearly capture the scope of her daring physical performance. Like Charlize Theron in *Monster*, she’s likely to be lauded for being an otherwise slim and traditionally attractive woman who’s put on a bit of weight for the role—an act that should, in any civilized society, be treated as a mundane reality that a normal person might go through.
However, it’s the way she carries herself in her body that proves utterly magnetic. As the younger Christy, she moves with a casual androgyny that forms the character’s baseline. That she’s initially unapologetic about her sexuality informs the confidence with which she moves outside the ring, which makes it all the more intriguing that she’s timid and boyish between the ropes during her initial fights.
Christy is, intentionally or otherwise, a story mapped onto Sweeney’s body language. It’s about trying to reconcile the person she is outside the ring with the fighter she is inside it—even though the dialogue says otherwise, eventually revealing things about her in-ring experience that don’t remotely gel with what’s on screen. It’s also about what happens when Christy’s reconciliation of her personal and professional self goes too far, and she becomes too big for her britches. It’s also about the way her husband exerts increasing control when this happens.
But Sweeney’s performance is the dramatic catalyst, and watching her grow more sure of herself as she fights is an utter delight.
Granted, the film seldom traces her specific skills and how she hones them—its fight sequences are too chaotic to make much narrative sense—but in the process, *Christy* becomes the sports movie version of a rom-com in which a woman is inexplicably unaware of her own beauty, swapping out good looks for in-ring strength, and the cliché of taking off one’s glasses or letting one’s hair down for a mean right hook.
She seems delighted and even surprised when she knocks out her opponents, which only fuels her transformation into a confident bruiser, and eventually, an asshole.
Unfortunately, it takes a painfully long time—nearly two hours of the 135-minute runtime—for the film to coalesce around her. In its final act, the movie mercifully blossoms into a gloomy mood piece about the effects of Jim’s lifelong torment. But until then, it’s positively tedious.
*Christy* is neither *Raging Bull*, which mirrors the violence inside and outside the ring, nor *I, Tonya*, whose rapid tonal switches emphasize the way otherwise shocking domestic violence becomes routine. Instead, it’s a film in which these horrors are flattened and backgrounded until it’s far too late, which is its own kind of statement about how they fester—but makes for strange dramatic disconnects, given how the story’s most visceral aspects are gestured towards but ultimately shoved into the margins.
Christy’s battle may be against other fighters, her husband, and what the world expects of her—but Sweeney’s battle is against filmmaking that tries to restrain her from effectively expressing these various struggles. She wins out in the end, but just barely.
*Christy* will be released theatrically on November 7, 2025, and should be available to stream later this year.
https://decider.com/2025/10/21/sydney-sweeney-christy-movie-review/