'Christy' Review: Sydney Sweeney gives an award-worthy performance in a true-life boxing drama
- Dan Bremner
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner- October, 2025
I didn’t go into Christy with especially high expectations. I half-expected one of those formulaic “crowd-pleasing underdog sports dramas”, the kind that exist purely to bag a few award nominations and inspirational Instagram edits. I like Sydney Sweeney well enough (She has more than proved her worth outside that dreadful Euphoria show), but I figured this would be her big awards showcase. What I didn’t expect was a surprisingly brutal, harrowing, and genuinely absorbing character piece about a woman fighting battles far beyond the ring. What starts as an uplifting boxing biopic quickly becomes something darker, rawer, and far more interesting than I anticipated.
Maybe it helped that I went in to know next to nothing about Christy Martin’s real story. No trailer, no context, just the vague knowledge that she was an important figure in women’s boxing. That made the film’s turns more shocking, the way it peels back from the adrenaline and glamour of early success into the suffocating reality of Christy’s abusive marriage and the physical and emotional toll of her life choices. It’s uncomfortable, it’s upsetting, but it’s also riveting where it counts.
Sydney Sweeney gives a genuinely career-best performance here. It’s the kind of turn that makes you forget every meme or “Euphoria” headline and just see her as a proper, serious actor. Her Christy is defiant and brittle all at once, a woman trying to weaponise her pain into power, even when that power gets stolen back from her again. She absolutely nails the physicality of a boxer, but it’s in the smaller, quieter moments that she shines most, the way she balances vulnerability mixed with her determination to fight. It’s a raw, bruised performance that only makes me more interested in her further career.
Opposite her, Ben Foster continues his reign as one of the best character actors working today. His Jim Martin is genuinely monstrous, not a cartoon villain, but something more insidious, insecure, pathetic, and controlling in a way that makes your skin crawl. It’s a difficult role that requires restraint and ugliness in equal measure, and Foster never flinches. His scenes with Sweeney are some of the hardest to watch in any film this year, especially in a particularly sudden and harrowing scene in the third act. And that’s a compliment.
There’s solid work from the supporting cast, too. Chad L. Coleman nearly steals the film as Don King, swaggering into the story with that wild, larger-than-life charisma and biting humour that feels perfectly timed among all the darkness. He brings a sense of scale and absurdity to the boxing world, showing the circus behind the sport while Sweeney’s character drowns in it. Even the minor figures, trainers, promoters, and TV execs feel lived-in and authentic, including a memorable role from Katy O'Brian as Christy's initial rival, then eventually sanctuary. The only weak spot is Christy’s vile mother, who’s so detestable that she starts to feel like an exaggerated caricature of cruelty with her callousness. Still, Merritt Wever sells it as the bigoted and conservative mother, and if anything, it just makes you root harder for Christy’s escape.
Director Michał Michôd (Animal Kingdom, The Rover, War Machine) brings a steadier hand here, and while his approach is a little cleaner and more digital-looking than I’d like, his control over tone is excellent. The boxing scenes are shot with kinetic energy and strong sound design that creates a sense of rhythm and sweat that feels authentic. Where Michôd stumbles slightly is in the overly glossy visual palette; the cinematography feels too neat for something this gritty and occasionally clashes with the film’s nastier emotional realism.
But what the direction lacks in grit, the storytelling makes up for in heart and honesty. Christy works because it refuses to romanticize its subject. It doesn’t present her as a saint or martyr, just as a person trying to survive a nightmare through the one thing she can control: her fists. There’s power in how small the film is willing to get, focusing on her loneliness, her confusion, and her gradual rediscovery of herself. By the time the film reaches its climax, it earns its catharsis without ever feeling like a manipulative “Oscar moment.”
Sure, Christy doesn’t fully avoid the usual biopic pitfalls. It still hits the familiar beats of the rise, the fall, the redemption arc, and occasionally gets a little too sentimental with some clunky dialogue. But those flaws feel small compared to how affecting it all is. There’s real bruised beauty here, and for a genre as overdone as sports biopics, that’s saying something. It would make an interesting double bill with The Smashing Machine (Another excellent recent sports biopic that's going unfairly overlooked).
Christy is a tough, uncomfortable, and surprisingly engaging take on the real-life boxer as a person as well as a fighter. Sydney Sweeney delivers her best performance to date, Ben Foster is terrifyingly good in a thoroughly disgusting role, and Michał Michôd proves that he can balance brutality with compassion. It might not be perfect and hit a lot of obvious beats in a worn genre, but there was a lot more to this story than I expected.
The biopic Christy will be released in UK cinemas on November 28, 2025.
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