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.
The Biopic Problem
It’s tricky calling out what are considered biopic clichés 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 rather than a filmmaker’s because many of them, as films, struggle balancing involving the viewer versus just 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 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 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’s Transformation
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, slowly discovering he’s a physically and mentally abusive piece of shit. 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 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. It’s a multi-layered performance that transcends the film’s structural limitations, reminding us why actor-focused biopics remain Hollywood’s bread and butter despite their formulaic nature.
Ben Foster’s Vile Villain
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.
Foster’s Jim isn’t as layered as the villain of the piece—he’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. The performance works not because it’s subtle—it isn’t—but because it effectively embodies the banality of abusive evil.
Structural Speed Bumps
Again, unless you’ve got the panache and confident energy of a Scorsese, 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.
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. This is a showcase, not a story—and that’s both the film’s strength and its fundamental limitation.
What Could Have Been
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.
More should have been done toward the end to focus on Christy Martin’s more recent life as an abuse survivor and as someone finally living her truth, rather than the bulk of it dealing with Jim’s nastiness and manipulative pivots. The film gets so caught up in depicting the abuse—making sure we understand how terrible Jim was—that it shortchanges Martin’s recovery, redemption, and ultimate triumph.
This is particularly frustrating because the epilogue text reveals Martin eventually found happiness with Holewyne, her former rival turned life partner. That story—of two women who once fought each other in the ring finding love and building a life together—deserved more than text on screen. It deserved scenes, emotion, catharsis. Instead, we get Jim’s villainy stretched across two hours while Martin’s hard-won freedom and joy are summarized in bullet points.
The 2025 Biopic Landscape
Christy exists in a particularly crowded biopic year. Between The Smashing Machine (Dwayne Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr), Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Jeremy Allen White as Bruce during the Nebraska sessions), and numerous other performance-forward biographical films, 2025 is shaping up as the year actors got to play dress-up in someone else’s life.
What separates the great biopics from the merely adequate isn’t just performance—though that’s crucial—it’s finding a compelling cinematic reason to tell this story in this medium. Walk the Line worked not just because of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances, but because it found visual and narrative language specific to Johnny Cash’s story. I’m Not There took Bob Dylan’s life and made it avant-garde poetry.
Christy never finds that specific language. It tells Martin’s story competently, even movingly at times, but it doesn’t transcend the “and then this happened, and then this happened” structure that plagues so many biopics.
What Works Despite Everything
Despite its structural issues, Christy succeeds in moments—particularly when Sweeney is in the ring. The boxing sequences feel visceral and immediate, capturing both the technical skill and raw emotion of Martin’s fights. Michôd, who’s proven himself capable of intense, violent cinema, stages these scenes with brutal efficiency.
The film also deserves credit for not sanitizing the homophobia Martin faced—from her family, from the boxing world, from society at large. It doesn’t treat her sexuality as something that needs explaining or justifying; it simply shows how that fundamental part of her identity was weaponized against her by people who should have protected her.
And Sweeney genuinely transforms. This isn’t just good makeup and a accent—though both are excellent. It’s the way she carries herself, the way she moves in the ring, the way her eyes telegraph Martin’s mixture of defiance and deep-seated shame. Sweeney disappears into the role in ways that feel earned rather than showy.
The Verdict
Christy is an actor’s dream, and Sydney Sweeney will find herself in the catbird seat come awards season despite the film feeling like a chore at times. It does nothing notably different from other biographies, breaking no molds, offering nothing new except a look into the hardscrabble life of a trailblazing boxer and her brush with death.
Sweeney, to her credit, is quite excellent though, and it’s because of her that any forward momentum is found within the film. She elevates material that could have been merely competent into something occasionally transcendent, even if she can’t overcome the film’s fundamental structural problems.
Christy is fine… a film that will satisfy audiences looking for a solid performance-driven drama but will leave those hoping for innovative biographical storytelling wanting more. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a decision win rather than a knockout: technically proficient, occasionally impressive, but ultimately playing it too safe to be truly memorable.
For Sydney Sweeney, though, it’s a career-defining performance that announces her as a serious dramatic actress capable of carrying ambitious projects. She’s just waiting for a director and script that can match her commitment.
