Sydney Sweeney in David Michôd’s Boxing Bio-Drama

Starting with his breakthrough feature, the simmering Australian crime family saga Animal Kingdom, David Michôd has leaned frequently into dark material. There’s grit but also lugubriousness in Christy, an inspirational sports movie that morphs in somewhat ungainly style into an unflinching depiction of domestic violence. It’s only when that ugliness creeps in that the director seems fully engaged. Until then, it’s a pedestrian and numbingly repetitive drama in which the stakes just never seem all that high. We watch Sydney Sweeney as real-life ‘90s boxing star Christy Martin land one power punch after another, felling a stream of opponents without ever acquiring much dimension as a character.

Opening in early November, the film will be the inaugural release for the newly formed U.S. distribution arm of indie production outfit Black Bear. They better hope not too many of their potential audience have caught up with Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside, a far more trenchant and emotional study of a young female boxer who overcame adversity to become an Olympic competitor.

Michôd is a very capable craftsman, so there’s nothing inherently lacking in the movie except surprise — at least until Ben Foster, playing Jim Martin, the trainer that Miller married, goes full psycho.

Christy is a West Virginia college basketball player who enters a local boxing contest seemingly on a whim and demonstrates such a punishing straight-right punch that she’s soon snapped up by Tennessee promoter Larry (Bill Kelly) and winning fight after fight.

For a movie in which people are constantly getting slammed in the head or guts, there’s little tangible conflict for much of its protracted running time. Christy just seems to breeze through, from novice to welterweight champion, presented to feverish boxing fans as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” with no apologies to Loretta Lynn or Sissy Spacek.

Any concern that Christy’s parents, John (Ethan Embry) and Joyce (Merritt Wever), might have about their daughter pursuing a career in a violent sport are outweighed by their fear of scandal. A phone call from the mother of Rosie (Jess Gabor), her girlfriend since high school, puts Christy’s folks on high alert. “What you’re doing isn’t normal and we want you to have a normal, happy life,” says Joyce, the soft sweetness in her voice making the sting of her words more potent in Wever’s typically excellent performance.

When Larry sends her to train with Jim Martin, he advises Christy to take her mother along to meet him. “Jim’s a family man,” says Larry, nodding pointedly at Rosie to indicate that having a girlfriend might not go over well. That should fire up the drama with the tension of Christy having to hide her sexuality. But neither the script by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes nor Sweeney’s performance gives the queer angle much depth.

Christy’s first meeting with Jim reveals him to be a discourteous jerk, who rolls his eyes at the idea of “lady boxers” and looks to offload her quickly by having a male sparring partner make short work of her. But after taking one hit she then knocks him to the mat, forcing Jim to concede that she may be a natural.

Sweeney trained extensively and thickened up for the role, initially wearing a dark quasi-mullet, which only becomes less distracting when Foster shows up with a sparse thatch that’s even worse. (Seriously, why is it that movie budgets so often don’t stretch to decent wigs?) But Jim has thoughts on her hair, instructing her to grow it (“Nobody wants to see a butch girl fight”), and putting her in a pastel pink satin robe and shorts for her first pro fight. But those braided cornrows when she switches to blonde? Girl, no.

If Christy, who appears to have grown up as what used to be called a “tomboy,” feels any discomfort about this forced makeover, Sweeney doesn’t show it. Instead, the character is a frustrating mix of passivity and mouthiness, coming off cocky in the ring and at press conferences, where she occasionally drops lesbian epithets about her opponents.

Later in the film, Christy’s training partner and erstwhile opponent Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Bryan) calls her out on the forced nature of her tough-girl bravado. “You make it real easy for people to dislike you,” she tells her. Sadly, that’s true also for the audience.

When she’s not concussing other women in the ring, Christy is busy correcting reporters who assume her boxing success makes her a trailblazing feminist. Instead, she plays up the happy wife-and-homemaker angle. That makes her a malleable figure paired with a manipulative man, and while that scenario is the basis of much domestic abuse, there’s a nagging lack of nuance in Sweeney’s characterization.

Michôd stages most of the matches in slick but perfunctory style, only giving us a real sense of Christy’s tenacity when she goes up against what seems like her first well-matched opponent, Irish fighter Deirdre Gogarty. That fight, and a grueling faceoff against boxing dynastic royalty Laila Ali, are the rare times when tension is allowed to build in the ring. Generally, though, there’s not a lot of poetry in the fight scenes, despite Michôd mixing in ecclesiastical choral music with Antony Partos’ score.

The development of Christy’s relationship with Jim as he goes from coach to lover to controlling husband without much evidence of real feeling between them is strictly by-the-numbers. But when he starts retaliating to her criticisms with violence, the movie turns darker, veering into territory more characteristic of Michôd’s work.

Sweeney ably taps into the pathos of those scenes, but she’s most affecting in her stoicism when others like Rosie or one of her ringside support team, Big Jeff (Bryan Hibbard), offer to help get Christy out of what’s clearly an unendurable situation.

There’s also a terrific scene between Sweeney and Wever in which, during a birthday visit from Christy’s family, she takes Joyce outside to talk about her fear of Jim’s anger and her uneasiness about sexually explicit videos and photos he insists on taking of her. Having swallowed Jim’s charms hook, line and sinker, Joyce shoots her daughter a pitying look and says, “Oh Christy, you sound crazy,” reprimanding her for trash-talking her husband.

Jim’s reaction when Christy does finally summon the courage to leave is a shocking jolt of violence that ups the intensity and will undoubtedly be the movie’s most talked-about moment. But as horrifying as it is, it’s almost too little too late in a film that remains stubbornly unaffecting.

While Sweeney deserves credit for her physical transformation, I wish I had found Christy a little more interesting, with more spark of her own. Likewise Foster, who has played variations on this role too many times to be as chilling as the filmmakers no doubt intend.

The movie’s secret weapon is Wever, not softening Joyce’s judgmental coldness even when her daughter has been almost killed. O’Brian also impresses, she and Hibbard both injecting welcome notes of warmth and tenderness. But the livewire performance that sparks up the movie just as it’s starting to flatten is Chad Coleman as a hilarious Don King, chortling away even as he’s making it clear he’s a shrewd businessman with no time for amateurs or fools.