Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Next up on the list is Christy, a biopic based on the true story of welterweight champion Christy Martin, the first female boxer ever to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated. Longtime MCC readers know sports aren’t usually my thing (the Creed trilogy doesn’t count because, uh, reasons!), but when time permits I do keep an ear open whenever buzz builds for potential future Oscar nominees. Quite a few actresses have endured the ritual of severe deglamorization For Your Oscar Consideration — toughening up, radically altering their physique, shedding their Instagrammable hairstyles, letting costume designers embarrass them, and in a preponderance of cases wrangling a thick southern accent. Sydney Sweeney, best known for such TV series as Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus, takes a break from playing rich women with beauty regimens to explore that transformational career option.

By and large, writer/director David Michôd (Animal Kingdom, The King), along with co-writers Mirrah Foulkes (who’s acted in five of his films) and Army Wives creator Katherine Fugate, stick to the standard rise-and-fall-and-rise-again formula, to the extent that the subject’s life follows it. They follow the life of Christy Salters from her humble beginnings as a West Virginia teen whose only real talent was roughhousing, which her parents didn’t mind so much, and who had a certain predilection for the ladies, which utterly horrified her mom, played by the usually great Merritt Wever (Severance, Unbelievable), who’s trapped inside a judgmental caricature topped with a church-bake-sale wig. To be fair, some folks are one-note in reality, so Wever might simply be doing the best she can with what she’s got to work with.

Through happenstance Christy parlays her aggressive demeanor and self-taught penchant for powerful haymakers into the boxing ring, which pays pretty well compared to the average Appalachian part-time jobs. Her rise is made possible by trainer Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster (Hell or High Water, X-Men: The Last Stand) as swaggering and pathetic at once, the sort of loser who could only make a living by exploiting a rube. Wide-eyed and overwhelmed by all those hundreds she was winning, Christy was half Jim’s age but put up with him long enough that he became her manager, her husband, her parasite, and her worst enemy.

In between scenes of Christy mowing down the competition one by one and becoming famous under her new married name, Meanwhile Behind the Scenes, Things Were Falling Apart™. Parts of her story and Jim’s stupid face are too ugly for a Lifetime movie, but we witness his repugnance through mostly passive-aggressive tactics as he keeps her under his thumb, separates her from her family, gets her hooked on coke, and, whenever the viable-opponent pool dries up, coaxes her into doing fetish videos to pay the bills while his unemployed self stands back and “supervises”. The tension escalates until the shocking 2010 incident that nearly ended her life, which Michôd plays out in real time with a devastating banality.

As a boxing film, Christy is only so-so. Most of the fights are in montages, some lasting a few laughable seconds. Only a couple run longer, the best and scariest one being a dramatization of that time in 2003 when her ego grew large enough to take on Laila Ali, daughter of The Greatest himself, even though they weren’t in the same weight class. Among the film’s funniest nuances, you can hear fifteen pounds of loose change jingling in Christy’s baggy pockets as she walks up to the scales and commits a fraud. But the match — which she asked for! — is humbling and damaging. Ali is played as a brute force of nature by Naomi Graham, a real-life boxer, Olympic athlete and Army veteran. This version of Ali isn’t as eloquent and, as a deliverer of a most painful reckoning, is more like the second coming of Clubber Lang.

Much of the film’s heart is occluded till the final twenty minutes, in the usual biopic denouement where the Worst Person Ever is out of the picture, any runner-up antagonists are shot down or brought to repentance, and Our Heroine learns who’s really in her corner. Sweeney remains committed to her dressed-down, rural-survivor performance so convincingly that I was never once reminded of how deeply I loathed her White Lotus spoiled brat, and was relieved that, as Hollywood Southern cosplay goes, she felt more sincere to me than the meth-stricken histrionics of Hillbilly Elegy. While Christy ultimately has to live down the consequences of her naivete and her own stubbornness — her get-in-the-ring braggadocio partly feeding her refusal to ask for help whenever she clearly needs some — Michôd doesn’t exonerate others in her life, especially the men in her circle who saw Jim’s shenanigans, stood by and did nothing. Some folks wouldn’t listen to A Girl, but the most hurtful bystanders were those who just kept watching with hands in pockets, silently hoping in vain that she’d ask them for help, for only then might their white-knight powers activate.

Christy‘s most telling departure from the boxing-film subgenre is how her final confrontations happen outside the ring — the one place where she was most uncomfortable, least safe, and had to act least like herself. Our expectation of a climax that lets her pummel Jim’s lumpy face into mashed baby food is sadly denied. But that isn’t how real-life dramas usually end.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The opponents who fall prey to the Coal Miner’s Daughter montage-pummeling include Katy O’Brian (The Mandalorian, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning) as Lisa Holewyne, a Hawaiian-born fighter whose demeanor and reactions seem steadier than the rest for reasons revealed later (for viewers who don’t know her full story). O’Brian, an Indiana native, continues rising up my rankings of Actors Who Make Every Film They’re In a Little Better while Merritt Wever slides a few notches down the chart here. Ethan Embry (Empire Records, That Thing You Do!) is Christy’s dad, who seems too passive or too wiped out from coal-mining to keep her domineering mom in check.

The biggest jolt of energy comes from special guest Chad Coleman (The Wire, The Walking Dead) as the legendary promoter Don King himself, who indeed signed her at her career’s height. Coleman resists the easy impulse to play him as an over-the-top cartoon (very near the top, but not quite up-‘n’-over) and captures his room-filling enthusiasm and his business savvy, to the chagrin of Jim and his transparent uselessness.

Other unhelpful men along the sidelines include Tony Cavalero (The Righteous Gemstones, the new CBS sitcom DMV) and Miles Mussenden (Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger, DC’s Doom Patrol).

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Christy end credits, though they reveal one Justin Stafford as the mastermind behind the most disturbing period-piece items in the film: Foster’s wigs, each holding less hair than the one before it, so Jim perpetually looks like a schlub who couldn’t score with a single lady down at the Regal Beagle.

But wait! There’s more! Technically with spoilers ahead for the film!

After our screening came a special Q&A with the subject herself — Christy Salters, f/k/a Christy Martin, technically spoiling the ending in that, no, Jim didn’t murder her, though not for lack of trying. She also brought along her cute little dog Champ, who shares a few scenes in the film with Sweeney and who defied my amateurish attempts to get them both in the same pic.

(Heartland’s site had also listed her wife Lisa Holewyne, as a guest, but she wasn’t there, for whatever reason. And yeah, they married in 2017.)

Her last match was in 2012, but she’s hardly kept idle. She now runs Christy Martin Promotions, where she gets to be a kinder Don King for other boxers out there, as well as a domestic violence charity called Christy’s Champs that helps victims and survivors through their ordeals with their own personal Jims.

Salters confirmed she worked closely with the film’s production and appreciated they resisted the usual urge to Hollywood-ize every aspect of her life. When asked, she did reveal the character of Rosie (Shameless‘ Jess Gabor), depicted as her first teenage girlfriend who drops back into her life a few times, was actually a composite of two different women. The film couldn’t possibly have contained everything and left out some parts — her grandfather’s suicide, her high school alcoholism, plenty more Don King stories, and so on.

We didn’t have much time for questions because the theater’s preceding showing of The Tenderness Tour had run long for some reason and by this point it was pretty late in the evening. Our audience was most curious about “Whatever Happened To…?” concerning anyone who wasn’t already covered in the film’s own “Where Are They Now” standard biopic text epilogue. Her mom passed away from cancer last February without ever truly reconciling with her — approving her daughter’s big TV fights was about as “accepting” as she ever got. But she’s on good terms with her dad, who just celebrated his eightieth birthday.

The most interesting “this is a comment, not a question” came from a gentleman in a Red Corner Club polo shirt who’s known her for years and who knew Jim back in the day. Though he thought Sweeney did just fine, he vouched for Foster’s creepy performance as being “frighteningly accurate”. Somehow that made my skin crawl even more.

(One last bit of fun trivia: neither in the movie nor at the Q&A was the audience privy to the fact that Jim died in prison last year. As Forensic Files fans know, that is how real-life dramas usually end.)