Charlotte hides in plain sight in 'Christy'
'Christy,' filmed mostly in Charlotte, is now playing in theaters everywhere
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on November 7, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Review: ‘Christy’ uses Charlotte anonymously to unfurl a heavyweight drama about a trailblazing boxer fighting her way through addiction, abuse and her own contradictions
by Lawrence Toppman
By a freak of cinematic timing, two movies shot mostly in Charlotte and its environs opened this fall one month apart.
“Roofman” named us, claimed us, shamed us a little (for failing to catch a crook who lived in a Toys ‘R’ Us building for months) and left us smiling.
“Christy” uses us to impersonate West Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and other spots, never letting the camera settle on a locale that clearly says “Queen City.” If it leaves you with a smile, that will be because you sat through a horrific incident near the end to see the heroine’s final moment of happiness before the credits. But it’s the more interesting film.
Whether or not Sydney Sweeney’s publicists have been the people fanning the flames of Oscar talk, she’d be a legitimate contender. She plays Christy Martin, the first female boxer on the cover of Sports Illustrated and a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Sweeney has been deglamorized and, in the script by Mirrah Foulkes, Katherine Fugate and David Michôd, dares us to like her character.
Christy is blunt-spoken to the point of rudeness, a taunting clown inside the ring and usually a surly loner outside it, a friend who drops people close to her until she needs them, a cocaine addict in mid-career, and a spouse with so little self-esteem she stays in a psychologically abusive marriage to her trainer. She’s also delusional, insisting on a comeback at almost 43 in 2011, seven months after a near-death experience.
“You know how easy you make it for people to dislike you?” asks Lisa Holewyne, a former opponent who helps Martin train for a bout with her most dangerous foe. Yet Sweeney embraces all of her character’s complications, doesn’t smooth rough edges and ultimately gets our respect and even our good wishes. Director Michôd packs the film with incidents — a few too many, as it has a 135-minute running time while covering 25 years — but he’s always safe when he lets the resilient Christy carry the action.
Ben Foster, who has played a nearly unbroken string of creeps and psychos over three decades, embodies the quietly sinister Jim Martin; even his proposal of marriage sounds sinister. He’s driven mad by his financial reliance on his wife, her indifference in bed — Christy Martin says today she knew from childhood she was a lesbian — and boxing promoters’ unwillingness to take him seriously. Don King, played with beefy amiability and a no-nonsense demeanor by Chad Coleman, brushes him off like a fly on the rim of a martini glass.
Women’s boxing in the United States began more than a century before Christy Martin earned her first win by knocking out Angela Buchanan in 1989 (in Durham, as the film doesn’t tell you). But her 1996 bout against Deirdre Gogarty on the Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno undercard, which you can watch here in its entirety, helped legitimize women’s boxing as a sport, even with Martin wearing pink boots and pink trunks with tassels.
Martin argues in the film and in life that she’s not a feminist, just someone who felt at home unloading her anger in the ring and knew no other way to earn a living. But she proves you don’t have to tell everybody you’re blazing a trail to be remembered as a great pioneer.
P.S. Although I didn’t see any locations I recognized as my adopted hometown, the producers do thank the Charlotte Checkers and Carolina Ascent FC and acknowledge the support of film commissions in the Charlotte region and the state. So the beat-up trailer, humble practice gym, auto racing dirt track, smoky poolroom and rundown ranch house are definitely ours.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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