Christy Review: A Champion Worth Discovering

Sometimes a film lands in your lap at a festival and hits so hard you spend months wondering why the rest of the world didn’t feel the impact. I caught Christy at its world premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, and by the time the credits rolled, my jaw was somewhere near the floor with the rest of the audience. I knew nothing about boxer Christy Martin walking in, which meant every triumph and horror in her remarkable life caught me completely off guard. Director David Michôd (The Rover) has crafted a sports biopic that operates like a slow-building gut punch, and Sydney Sweeney delivers the kind of fearless, fully inhabited performance that announces a new phase in an already impressive career.

The film traces Martin’s trajectory from scrappy West Virginia basketball player to the most famous female boxer of the 1990s. She was the first woman boxer on the cover of Sports Illustrated and the first to headline a pay-per-view fight. But Christy is equally interested in what happened outside the ring. Under the controlling eye of trainer-turned-husband Jim Martin (Ben Foster, 3:10 to Yuma), Christy navigates an abusive marriage, a complicated relationship with her dismissive mother Joyce (Merritt Wever, Marriage Story), and the suppression of her own identity in an era that demanded she stay closeted. Michôd and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes don’t shy away from any of it, building toward a harrowing 2010 confrontation that leaves Martin fighting for survival.

Sweeney is ferociously committed here. She gained over thirty pounds of muscle, trained for months, and performed her own boxing sequences without a stunt double. While the occasional line reading slips into her trademark deadpan delivery, this is overwhelmingly a sensational, fully realized portrayal of a woman who spent decades taking hits in every sense.

She’s surrounded by collaborators working at peak level. Foster is genuinely terrifying as Jim, a man whose manipulation curdles into something monstrous. Wever delivers devastating lines of emotional coldness without ever raising her voice, crafting a mother whose rejection cuts deeper than any punch. Two supporting players deserve special mention: Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding) as Lisa Holewyne, Christy’s rival-turned-partner whom she married in 2017 and Chad L. Coleman (The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster), who nearly walks off with the entire film as Don King in just a handful of electric scenes.

Germain McMicking‘s cinematography captures the propulsive energy inside the ring while revealing the mundane grind of life outside it, showing exactly why Christy lived for competition. Production designer Chad Keith and costume designer Christina Flannery work in tandem to evoke the era’s clashing textures, reminding us visually that Christy was always a small fish fighting her way through an enormous pond. Composer Antony Partos underscores both the triumph and the terror without overplaying either.

I’m writing this review in late December, well after Christy arrived in theaters and promptly tanked at the box office. Much of the blame landed on Sweeney due to unrelated public discourse, which strikes me as profoundly unfair. This was a marketing failure from an indie studio that couldn’t compete during a crowded awards season, released at entirely the wrong moment. The film deserved better. Sweeney deserved better. In three or four years, people are going to stumble onto Christy streaming somewhere, forget whatever noise surrounded its release, and wonder aloud why we all slept on it. Don’t wait that long.