CHRISTY is a biopic of Christy Salters, once known as Christy Martin, a pioneer of women’s professional boxing, competing from 1989-2012. It’s a very effective movie that hits some of the pleasing notes you want out of a normal sports drama, plus the additional joys of watching a woman be tough and rowdy at a time when most of society demanded she be “ladylike.” And if you know any biographical details of Salters at all you will be able to imagine a few other ways it stands out from every other boxing movie.

It’s directed by David Michôd (ANIMAL KINGDOM, THE ROVER), written by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes (JUDY AND PUNCH), story by Katherine Fugate (THE PRINCE & ME), but all the discussion has centered on its star, Sydney Sweeney (THE MARTIAL ARTS KID). It’s another acting achievement unlocked for her – she reportedly put on 30 pounds during 3+ months of fight training so she wouldn’t have to use a stunt double. To my ignorant eyes she looks good in the ring, first with no discipline, then an evolving style. And that doesn’t necessarily seem like the hardest part of the role.

When we meet her Christy’s sport is basketball, but she’s been entering tough man competitions, winning a couple hundred bucks and a cool jacket, getting some laughs out of it. Her brother Randy (Coleman Pedigo) is proud of her, but her parents, Joyce (Merritt Wever, GREENBERG) and John (Ethan Embry, LATE PHASES), don’t seem so supportive at the moment. Dad is real quiet but Mom confronts her about what people have been saying about her and that girl Rosie (Jess Gabor, BATTLE IN SPACE: THE ARMADA ATTACKS). Wants her to see a priest about it.

Yes, from the start this is a story about a young woman from a town (Itmann, West Virginia) and family that tell her not to be the person she wants to be. Luckily she has the instinct to tell them to fuck off. Also lucky (at least for her career): boxing promoter Larry Carrier (Bill Kelley, PAIN & GAIN) sees her fight, thinks she has potential and sends her to get some real training from James Martin (Ben Foster, WARCRAFT, so transformed I didn’t realize it was him for a couple scenes even though I knew Foster was in the cast). Christy can’t bring her girlfriend because “Jim is a family man, do you understand what I mean?,” so Joyce comes instead, and encourages her not to give up when Jim’s piggish disinterest in teaching her makes Christy conclude “I’m not doing it, he’s a dick.”

Joyce chides her about giving up, the correct advice in any other sports drama, but in this case not so black and white. Jim will start to be impressed by her, begin to see her potential, and help her achieve her dreams, as is the formula. But also he’ll be much worse than a dick. This isn’t only a biopic. It’s a true crime movie.

Christy ends up living in a trailer in the desert, focused on fighting. She becomes truly isolated when Rosie doesn’t understand her love of the sport, and then leaves her for a man. So it’s a nice surprise later on when Christy has been living in Apopka, Florida with Jim and Rosie is in town and wants to have lunch. But Jim is so jealous he follows Christy, interrupts an innocent conversation, threatens her that being exposed as a lesbian will end her career, tells her she should marry him. Which she does. The age gap is never addressed because the more pressing matter is coercing her out of the life she really wants.

But she makes the sacrifice for boxing, and that works. There’s a montage of training and competing set to “Bust a Move.” She’s taught to fight better and to look more girly for the cameras, she meets and impresses Don King (Chad L. Coleman, COPSHOP), gets on the cover of Sports Illustrated, makes history on the undercard of a Mike Tyson pay-per-view, learns the promotional power of trash talk (which comes to her pretty naturally), somehow even wins a fight against Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian, SWEET GIRL), in a scene that makes us question our narrative loyalty to Christy because Lisa seems nice and she’s such a jerk to her. If you’re like me you were knocked on your ass by O’Brian in LOVE LIES BLEEDING and you’re ready for her to be a lead again instead of an exciting guest star. That doesn’t change here, but she plays a crucial role including a stretch where the bitter rival comes to help the hero train for a seemingly unwinnable fight. The ol’ Rocky and Apollo. Good shit.

You don’t need to know what happened in the true story to sense that Jim is an off-the-charts scumbag. I personally tend to dig how aggressively actorly Foster can get in a role like HELL OR HIGH WATER or HOSTILES, and this one goes further into chameleonry than he probly ever has or will again, but I think he plays much more natural than usual. Just enough humanity that we can understand her sympathy for him while he continues to control and manipulate her.

Nobody’s gonna top what a bastard he is, but Joyce is a hell of a villain too, and though I don’t expect this to go anywhere I think Wever is as awards-worthy as Sweeney and Foster. There’s a direct reference to MILLION DOLLAR BABY, which made me think of Joyce as the more fleshed out version of Hilary Swank’s cartoonishly horrible family in that movie. One of the top most crushing moments is when (SPOILER) Christy finally gets scared enough to admit to herself that Jim is dangerous and asks her mom for help. Joyce listens and then tells her “You sound crazy” and lectures her. She’s become close to Jim over the years and her loyalties lie with him over her own daughter.

We know domestic violence is bad, and watching it re-enacted on screen isn’t necessarily going to teach us anything new, but I think this is a particularly powerful illustration of some of the reasons it’s hard to escape. Christy has built a strong friendship with Big Jeff (Bryan Hibbard, one episode of Cobra Kai), who works with her at the gym, and despite his long relationship with Jim he clearly sees that Christy is being wronged and tries to intervene. Still, when things boil over right there at the gym nobody knows how to stop it. There’s a heartbreaking bit involving her sparring partner Short Dog (Tony Cavalero, The Righteous Gemstones), whose expression says so much simultaneously about sympathy for Christy, fear of Jim, and shame for his inaction.

Now time for a spoiler warning and trigger warning. One of the most pivotal parts of Salters’ story is that her husband tried to kill her. The scene is as horrifying as you would imagine, and then some. This guy we’ve hated for many years has finally really lost it. He stabs and shoots her and then wanders into the bathroom in a daze, luckily leaving her alone long enough for her to stumble away. There’s a particular detail about her injuries that’s not something I’ve seen in all my years of watching violent movies, making it feel more true. Most sports dramas are inspirational because they’re about prevailing in sports, and CHRISTY has that aspect, but it’s more inspirational about surviving violence. And for those of us lucky enough not to need that I think it’s also a lesson to remember Short Dog’s regrets and try to avoid having them ourselves if the time comes.

It’s an emotionally intense movie, but not just in the horrible shit that happens. More in how she continues and bonds with the people who remain in her life. And wait, there’s more! It’s also a story about being outed and becoming free. CREED makes me weepy and so did this one, but not in the ring. There was one other person at the Wednesday matinee I went to and I heard him sniffling, it wasn’t just me.

[Deep breath.] Okay. Now I have to write this part.

When I reviewed AMERICANA recently I tried not to get too deep into the culture war shit that had consumed discussion of the movie (in conjunction with its lack of box office). Now it’s escalated enough I can’t avoid it. Though I saw little advertisement for CHRISTY and assumed it was a limited release, Box Office Mojo says it’s one of the top 12 worst new release openings for a movie on over 2,000 screens (just below THE EMPTY MAN, by the way), so the entertainment headlines were quick to celebrate another Sweeney flop. I get so frustrated seeing interesting movies that don’t even seem intended for wide audiences and then finding people who haven’t seen them discussing them in these bean counter terms. As a person who only benefits artistically from movies, not financially, I say good for The Rock doing THE SMASHING MACHINE, good for Blake Lively doing THE RHYTHM SECTION, good for Chris Hemsworth doing BLACKHAT and FURIOSA, why should I give a fuck that those lost money, why do I even know this? Are there sports fans who don’t care who won the game or if it was fun to watch, but rub their hands together about ticket sales? What is this sickness?

But with Sweeney it’s different because most of the gloating came from people who correctly hate bigotry and the MAGA takeover of the world and have accepted right wing grifters’ framing of her as its symbol. It’s a long story but after many months of failing to make the “wokeness is dead because there’s a curvy blond movie star!” narrative fly there was a pun in a jeans commercial, some subsequent interviews where Sweeney didn’t say what people wanted her to say about it, and a Guardian article saying she’s a registered Republican. She has avoided talking about her political beliefs, so people have decided to fill in the blanks and assume the worst.

They could be right. They seem to be basing it on dubious interpretations of press tour tea leaves and internet hearsay, and there’s a blatantly misogynistic zeal to the shaming that fits a very familiar historic pattern, but all of that could be true and she could still be a right wing jerk. If so she seems to be Jar-Jar-Binksing her way into a filmography of progressive-themed movies: the whistleblower movie REALITY, the revisionist neo-western AMERICANA, and of course IMMACULATE, the aggressively pro-reproductive-rights horror movie that was very much her baby. She remembered the script from a failed audition and liked it so much that years later when it hadn’t gotten off the ground she got the rights and produced it herself. And now she did CHRISTY.

After I’d already made plans to see CHRISTY there came a new wrinkle to the controversy. The entertainment news made sure I knew that Ruby Rose, another actress whose work I enjoy, posted on Instagram to mock the box office failure. She wrote that at some unspecified time she had been cast as “Cherry” (I suspect her character became Rosie, based on a real person named Sherry) and that the script had been much better before it was “ruined” by Sweeney, who she called a “cretin” who “hates us.”

I can only guess about the validity of Rose’s claims, and it’s not my place to debate her criticism of presumably straight actors playing lesbians. But I will defer to one person who felt Sweeney was the best choice for the role: the actual Christy Salters, who also opined about it on Instagram. Before the movie was released she wrote that “I couldn’t ask for a more amazing artist to portray me. It’s incredible to see how she embodies not just the fighter in me, but the woman who overcame it all.” After Rose’s post she wrote, “The past few days I have seen some people attack my friend Sydney Sweeney. Syd not only worked her ass off for this film, she worked her ass off for me. For my story. For so many others suffering in silence. So I want to be clear about who Syd is. She is my friend and ally!”

Of course, most of the replies are randos lecturing Salters about her own friend who they don’t know. Rose at least has some kind of inside perspective on the production. But for me the opinion of the person portrayed in the movie holds more weight than the person not in the movie who swears they would’ve been in a better version. (And nothing against Rose but I’m glad she didn’t play Rosie – with the unfamiliar Gabor in the role I was able to believe she’d been scared into living as a straight person and wouldn’t be in Christy’s life again.)

It’s foolish to count on all the artists we like to be great people with the same beliefs as us, and if they turn out to be horrible it’s up to each of us whether to hold that against the art or not. I do strongly believe Sweeney is a good actress choosing good movies and making really interesting career choices, but that’s completely separate from whether she’s the type of asshole the internet has decided she must be. If it turns out she is, I will be disappointed and it might change how I watch her movies. But I saw some people smearing her as a bad actress (wrong, dumb) and CHRISTY as some kind of MAGA movie (catastrophically asinine). If you’re saying the latter then we might have similar politics, but I hereby banish you from publicly sharing your movie takes. You are not qualified.

If Sweeney is some MAGA queen it’s too bad it didn’t work. Those people really could learn something from CHRISTY! Let’s recap what happens in it. Starting like a minute in it’s a story about a lesbian being pressured by her conservative family, town and religion to deny her true self. She goes to train with a sexist asshole who mocks women being in sports, and even after he changes his mind on that he still makes her say on TV that she’s not a feminist. Every time someone calls her pretty or tries to make her play up her looks it feels dirty. Every time she sleeps with a man it’s nasty and unnatural. When her husband abuses her her mom sides with the husband and her male friends don’t know how to help. The people there for her are her lesbian ex and her lesbian opponent, who’s also the conscience of the movie who tries to help her be less of an asshole. The most triumphant moments are speaking against her abuser in court and coming out – there’s more emphasis on those than on the victories in the ring. That’s one of the many reasons I think this is a great movie – it works as formula, while accomplishing something very different.