REVIEW: ‘Christy (2025)’ Is Actually Pretty Good, Despite The Odds

In a time oversaturated with biopics, it’s hard to trust that any of them will stand out or do something that hasn’t been done countless times before—let alone recently. Christy (2025), directed by David Michôd, is a boxing biopic spanning several decades of Christy Martin’s (Sydney Sweeney) life and career, a pioneer in women’s boxing in the United States.

While her story isn’t necessarily unique—there have been plenty of biopics about female boxers, abusive husbands, and queer coming of age—but Christy (2025) is unique in combining these elements to tell a story distinct from the many that have come before it. While the movie still trods the same well-worn path as most that came before it, it trods that path with conviction and inspiration.

From the time the movie begins, it’s clear that “the Coal Miner’s Daughter” has a difficult home life. She’s been sleeping with a woman, Rosie (Jess Gabor), and the town has started talking. Her mother (Merritt Wever) threatens to kick Christy out if she doesn’t break off contact with Rosie. It’s the first of a lifetime of abuses Christy receives from her mother, whose fragile, conservative dignity is more important to her than her daughter’s well-being.

Sydney Sweeney and Ben Foster both transform for their roles.

To escape the orbit of her family, Christy turns to boxing. And she’s very good at it very quickly. Sydney Sweeney is truly transformed into a smack-talking, hard-punching machine of a boxer in this role. It’s an unrecognizable character compared to her recent action and romance outings.

She doesn’t necessarily bring gravitas or melodrama to the role, but this may be to the movie’s benefit. Christy is an angry character, bottled up and ready to crack at any minute. In Sweeney’s performance, that most certainly comes through.

It also helps that Sweeney acts alongside Ben Foster, Christy’s absolutely loathesome husband. His hair and makeup alone scream “stay away from this man.” The menace in his acting is a bonus. When Christy first encounters Jim as her trainer, she’s in awe of his connections and his ability to help her start gaining recognition and fight in big fights.

Of course, when he starts coming onto her, she can’t say no. She can’t forsake the power he has over her life or prevent his physical power from overwhelming her for the next decade or so once she’s coerced into marrying him.

While much of Christy (2025) follows the standard biopic formula, it’s made of unique elements.

A more standard sports biopic would chart Christy’s rise to success and stardom more closely. She was, after all, a trailblazer in the sport and a major icon for many years. Instead, her progression finds itself more in the background. Major fights in her career are shown in full, bloody detail, but more like interludes in a life of struggle than anything else. The things Jim makes Christy do or does to her between the fights are what the movie focuses on more.

Some such scenes borderline on gratuitous, but knowing that the real Christy Salters (she took her name back after she was divorced from Jim) was heavily involved in the production of the movie, the level of detail in the graphic depiction of Christy’s abuse ultimately comes across as a commitment to telling a truth that Christy was never able to tell for herself.

The abuse Christy endures is not for some noble cause, either. She’s neither martyred nor pitied by the film’s gaze. Rather, her boxing career is a parallel to the fight she endured at home and in her heart. All the while she was taking Jim’s abuse, she still struggled with the fact that she was queer and couldn’t admit it to anybody, let alone herself. This aspect of the movie isn’t overplayed whatsoever. She slings homophobic slurs at opponents as a defense mechanism, but it’s not a source of self-abuse or a throughline for inner strife throughout the movie.

Rather, it’s a part of Chrity’s being that becomes her salvation and her recovery. The way her story ends is beautiful and inspirational. And yet, it’s also kind to the person who had to endure decades of horrors to arrive there at last. Even through its middle-of-the-biopic-road plot structure and character development, Christy (2025) deserves kudos for balancing these elements of her story so well.

Christy (2025) is, in many ways, a completely standard sports biopic. Yet, its combination of elements is unique amongst the throngs of competitors, just like Christy is as a boxer. The acting is solid, and the story is kind and forgiving to the parts of Christy’s past that deserve it, and brutally takes down those who tried and failed to bring her down with them.

Christy (2025) is playing in theaters now.