In an early scene in the official trailer for boxer Christy Martin’s biopic Christy, the boxing promoter Don King (Chad L. Coleman) is fascinated by Martin, portrayed with a particular awards season buzz by Sydney Sweeney. When they meet, she’s on track to become a world champion, one of the greatest to ever step into a ring and someone who could chance the face of boxing forever. But instead of talking about that, he tells her, “Jessie here says you fight in all pink.”
Walking, working, and fighting in Martin’s shoes finds Sweeney stepping into a world of intense public success, but also rampant misogyny and domestic violence at the hands of her trainer-turned-husband Jim Martin (Ben Foster). “You leave me, I’ll kill you,” he tells her in one scene. When she calls her mother and father to ask if she can come home to escape him, they gaslight her to hell and back. “You sound crazy,” her mother says. Meanwhile, all her father can think about is all the money and fame she’d lose if she ditches the trainer who treats her like an opponent behind closed doors.
Martin isn’t having it. “I’ve spent half my life hiding,” she says with Sweeney’s southern drawl. “It’s my house. It’s my things. It’s my home.” It won’t be an easy fight, but she’s in it to win it. “I think I found my thing,” she says. “I bet most people go their entire lives and they don’t even know what their thing is.”
In theatres Nov. 7, David Michôd’s Christy also features Katy O’Brian, Ethan Embry, Merritt Wever, Tony Cavalero, and more.
“There are moments when you are aware that you’re watching the labor of acting, seeing all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into playing Christy, and in that order,” Rolling Stone‘s David Fear wrote in a review of the film. “And then, occasionally, you’re not seeing an actor at all, just a fighter throwing wicked haymakers in the ring and battling twice as hard to survive outside of it.”
The trailer release follows weeks of controversy surrounding Sweeney’s recent campaign with American Eagle, which sparked allegations of dog-whistling eugenics. Ahead of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sweeney told Vanity Fair that she won’t allow Martin’s story to be overshadowed by the blowback. “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans,” Sweeney said. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about.”
From Rolling Stone US
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