The average boxer barely spends a hour tops in the confides of the ring, taking hit after hit. Unfortunately for real-life boxer Christy Martin, her fight was 24 hours daily. Based on the harrowing true story, David Michod (the Australian director behind Animal Kingdom and The Rover) presents us with a fairly paint-by-numbers sports biopic in the first half before pivoting to a survival story of one small, but tough woman and her monster of a husband and trainer.

Sydney Sweeney stars as Christy Salters, a closeted queer girl with a mean right hook who discovers a passion for squaring off in boxing gloves during her teenage years. Her parents (Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry) question her interests in everything, including her romantic proclivities. That all turns around once Christy meets the much-older fighting trainer James Martin (Ben Foster), and the prospects of having a glowing career all rest in his hands. Christy abandons her true nature and puts all her faith in James, who not only gets her in with legendary Hall of Fame promoter Don King (Chad L. Coleman) and into the international leagues as a professional boxer, but proposes to her as well. Soon Christy Salters becomes Christy Martin and as her fame skyrockets, her life behind-the-scenes falls victim to the heinous, abusive hands of her husband. Her husband is a genuine threat to her life, but everyone in her orbit admires him too much. Even her parents seem to prefer his company over hers. Stuck in an impossible situation, it seems Christy Martin has no hope left.

For those unfamiliar with Martin’s true story, much of what happens in the back half of the film will come as a genuine shock. Michod does not shy away from putting you in her shoes. The lack of craftsmanship in the filming of the actual boxing scenes begins to feel somewhat intentional, downplaying her professional fights in comparison to her grim home life. The second half of Christy is genuinely a tough sit, one that will be too much for certain audiences. But it is her truth and her survival is a story too miraculous to not be told. Those who go in hoping for an inspirational sports film and receiving a domestic abuse drama instead should be warned. While the results are harrowing by the end, the downside is for the first hour, Michod steps back and just lets his actors carry the engagement of the film, which takes a bit as the film is stuck with expected beats and a lack of strong vision. 

Sweeney is impressive as Christy, tapping in to her charmingly scrappy personality and allowing the audience an easy window into empathizing with her early on before she faces the dark unimaginable. Ben Foster as James is frighteningly good. It can be odd to see Foster, who early in his career was a wiry, thin young actor morph into this thick-built man with thinning hair, but he eases right into a slimy persona with unpredictable evil just bubbling under his skin. An unsettling, intimidating physical presence every time he is onscreen. Merritt Wever, as deplorable with her words and opinions as Foster is with his hands, plays a mother from hell, easy to hate thanks to the uncompromising writing, but feels drastically miscast, with an unfortunately phony accent and lack of grounded antagonism. 

While a film like I, Tonya had a truly preposterous scandal at the center of it that allowed for its overall tone to be a bit more colorful, Christy’s singular depiction of marital domestic abuse in the world of sports is raw and ugly. Impossible not to feel an uneasy pit in your stomach, even lingering still through her eventual triumph. It’s clear that Christy was still let down by almost everyone in her life, even by those who meant well, and that point is maybe not emphasized enough to feel full satisfaction no matter how upbeat the swelling music towards the end leads us to believe. Perhaps it misses a more honest conversation of passively, silently allowing violence, and with that, would make a stronger film. It’s hard to deny its overall impact, though. When it hits, it really hits hard.