Christy opens in theaters on November 7.
Sydney Sweeney is the latest to dance the biopic shuffle, punchily portraying boxing pioneer Christy Martin in a rather run-of-the-mill sports drama based on Martin’s game-changing rise to fame — along with her years of abuse at the hands of manager-husband Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Much like The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with Jeremy Allen White, Christy marches diligently alongside 2025’s middling, performance-forward biographies as Sweeney shines brightly in the midst of what is, basically as a blueprint, a life montage.
It’s a tricky thing to call out what are considered to be the cliches of a biopic because, well, it is someone’s real life. Accusing it of being hackneyed or by-the-numbers feels mean and dismissive. Remember though, the life in question is shoved through a Hollywood lens and formatted for our easy narrative consumption. Biopics have always been a performer’s medium and not so much a filmmaker’s because many of them, as films, have a hard time balancing involving the viewer vs. just merely showing the viewer. Christy takes us from 1989 to 2010, sometimes pausing for important landmarks but most often whisking us through the rest in a way that makes you wish there were some moments we spent more time with.
Christy, as a biography project, is a montage, filled with smaller, faster montages, speeding us through training, boxing, media rounds, and Martin’s almost parodic conservative parents (Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry giving their best West Virginia scowls). But Sweeney and director David Michôd (Animal Kingdom, The Rover) know well and good enough that we’ve come to watch a famous person look different and sound different. We’ve come to see how hard they’ve worked to change their appearance, alter their voice, and devote themselves to a particular skillset, be it sports or music or what have you. Because truth be told, we could all just watch the Netflix documentary (Untold: Deal With the Devil) and see a much more unfiltered telling of the tale.
Sweeney is tremendous here, physically transforming herself, telling the story of a woman trying to battle her way out of brutal trappings. Chastised and shunned at home for being a lesbian, Martin finds her calling in the ’90s boxing world — where no woman had ever found fame or fortune — drawn to the violence as both escape and catharsis. Once entrenched, however, Martin finds herself in quicksand after marrying her trainer, Jim, and slowly discovering that he’s a physically and mentally abusive POS. Any and all attempts she makes to move past him — even seeing Don King (played with glee by Chad L. Coleman) as a possible ticket to a Jim-free life — go up in flames thanks to Jim’s weaponized incompetence and manipulations.
Sweeney is tremendous here, physically transforming herself, telling the story of a woman trying to battle her way out of brutal trappings.
Ben Foster does a great job of being very vile as Jim, a mushy, wholly unimpressive man who manages to subdue a woman who could best him in every aspect, using the world’s (and her own family’s) misogyny and homophobia to his advantage. Eventually, Martin’s freedom is only found after wresting it from the jaws of death in 2010. Again, unless you’ve got the panache and confident energy of a Scorsese, then your biopic will probably tread through the same visual cues and hit the same structural speed bumps. There’s a point in Christy where it notes a time jump, that it’s jumping ahead a decade, but then, at the same time, it doesn’t really let you know that everything you watched before it took place over seven years.
It’s hard to make a movie biography that doesn’t feel like an uneven encapsulation or an endless parade of check-ins, and Christy is no exception to those pitfalls, sadly. Characters either tend to feel like stock caricatures or they’re simply underserved, like Martin’s entire training team outside of Jim. But the two main performances, particularly Sweeney’s, are good reminders that the spotlight is on the role here and not the particular obstacles or unspooling of struggles.
Sweeney is able to capture the desperate drive of Christy Martin, the shame she’s forced to feel for who she loves, and the vulnerability of a celebrity who projects a “tough as nails” persona. Foster’s Jim isn’t as layered as the villain of the piece who’s pretty much a miserable sack of dongs from the get-go, but he’s also playing the metaphoric role of patriarchal, societal shackles. Jim is able to slip through the cracks (well, until he cracks) because of how ugly things are for women. Katy O’Brian lights up the screen as Martin’s former boxing nemesis Lisa Holewyne, though her and Christy’s fate is unfortunately relegated to a “Where are they now?” epilogue crawl. A lot happens off-screen toward the end, including Jim’s comeuppance, that would have made for a much better finish.
