‘Christy’ review: Sydney Sweeney will convince her naysayers, not the movie

If you see “Christy,” you’ll remember Christy the person, not “Christy” the movie. This biopic of West Virginia’s other famous coal miner’s daughter Christy Martin, the first female boxer to make the cover of Sports Illustrated, is an efficiently inspiring and harrowing one when the physically transformed, emotionally present Sydney Sweeney is holding the screen as Martin. But otherwise, under David Michôd’s direction, it’s one more machine-pressed product that may as well have been chatbot-prompted into existence.

That’s a shame because early on, when butch, athletic, semi-openly gay Christy is just a picked-on high schooler punching her way into feeling good about herself, you can detect a keen level of attention, especially in the script by Mirrah Foulkes and Michôd, to what’s unspoken in these types of tales: the violence and verve that can mark a boxing talent and the pressure to conform in a male-dominated sport. In this case, it leads Christy to deny a part of her identity.

It’s a very specific tension that has made movies about female boxers in the 21st century — from “Girlfight” and “Million Dollar Baby” through last year’s “The Fire Inside” — so much more interesting as empowerment case studies than the male-centered ones, which still seem rooted in conventional mythmaking. (We’re still living in the Rocky Balboa Universe.)

As memorably conveyed with twang, sweat and tenacity by Sweeney, the young Christy is a natural competitor whose fists give her an out from the judgmental eyes of small-town life, most notably those of her mom (an effectively chilly Merritt Wever). She fights as if she’s been attacked, but can make winning in the ring look both spirited and a foregone conclusion.

That energy and commitment to turn boxing into a career gets an opportunistic fine-tuning — a feminizing pink kit — when she’s hooked up with trainer Jim Martin, played by an eerily dead-eyed Ben Foster as the ghoul-in-waiting he turned out to be. Foster’s Jim, believably disturbed and shady but a bit on the nose, isn’t the movie’s first problem. That would be Michôd’s addiction to montage-ifying every significant dramatic turning point, slathering on the music to keep the timeline moving.

But the famously chameleonic Foster’s portrayal is the film’s most curious dilemma, because it doesn’t allow us to see why Christy would trust her future to his judgment, much less marry him. It’s as if “Christy,” looking backward through a bloody yet unbowed lens, is afraid of presenting Jim Martin as anything but a shifty sleazebag, when what that does is undercut Sweeney’s more delicate job of convincing us why she’d stay with him for decades.

Sweeney manages it anyway, because, despite what you may have assumed, she’s a sturdy in-the-moment actor, especially with her eyes. Still, the movie’s lack of nuance about how toxic relationships develop makes this central twosome a head-scratchingly imbalanced one. Everyone invariably falls into two camps: unfailingly supportive (a sensitive dad played by Ethan Embry; Katy O’Brian as a former rival) or, whenever Wever reappears, jaw-dropping callousness. Much more galvanizing as a combo platter of high-wattage persuasion and dominance is Chad L. Coleman in his handful of scenes as Don King.

The central problem with “Christy” — which needs to be both uplifting about its star subject’s achievement and complex about her journey of sexuality and trauma — is that it screams for a treatment grittier than the slick melodrama we’ve been given. It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.