When Christy was released last year, it received a lot of attention for featuring Sydney Sweeney as a very unglamorous character.

In the role of real-life boxer Christy Martin, Sweeney spends the first hour of the film as a brunette who doesn’t wear makeup, wears baggy clothing, and has an unflattering haircut.  Coming straight from the mining communities of West Virginia, Christy is someone who can flatten a guy with one punch.  Of course, for all the attention that Sweeney got for downplaying her looks, she’s a blonde again for the film’s second hour and she never looks quite as bad as the filmmakers would have us believe.

If anyone does truly look bad in this film, it’s Ben Foster.  Foster plays James V. Martin, the boxing coach who took Christy under his wing, arranged for her to get signed by Don King (played by Chad Coleman), and basically managed her when she was at the peak of her career.  James Martin was also Christy’s horrifically abusive husband, a relentless, cocaine-snorting manipulator who built her up just to tear her down and who is currently in prison for attempting to murder Christy in 2010.  When Foster first appeared in the film, I had no idea it was him.  I didn’t discover that Foster was playing James until I glanced at the film’s Wikipedia page.  Balding, overweight, and speaking in a slurred voice that makes most of his sentences sound like thoughts that died while trying to escape from his brain, Foster is unrecognizable as James.  Ben Foster has played a lot of sleazy characters.  (I still think his best performance was as the charismatic but sociopathic Charlie in 3:10 to Yuma.)  James Martin is definitely one of the worst and the normally handsome Foster is made up to look about as bad as I’ve ever seen him look.

The film follows Christy from her time as a college basketball player through her boxing career.  We watch as she becomes the female boxing champion and as she loses it all due to a fight for which she wasn’t properly prepared.  We watch as she and James dabble in cocaine.  Even more importantly, we watch as Christy struggles to come to terms with her own sexuality.  In the film, Christy’s marriage to James is more about convincing herself — and her homophobic mother (Merritt Weaver) — that she’s straight than any actual love that may be shared between the two of them.  At one point, Christy taunts an out opponent while giving interviews about how, when she’s not in the ring, she’s a traditional wife who loves to cook and clean.  Christy is not only fighting the other boxer.  She’s also fighting her own sexual identity.

The film is well-acted by Foster, Weaver, and Sweeney.  Sweeney especially does a good job of portraying the anger that lies behind every punch that Christy throws.  When Christy hits someone, she’s not just hitting her opponent.  She’s also hitting the entire world.  Unfortunately, the film itself often falls victim to the biopic cliches that one always seems to find in films about boxers, even ones that are based on true stories.  This is especially true during the film’s first half.  The second half, which focuses on Christy breaking free from James, is considerably more compelling.  Much like last year’s The Smashing Machine, Christy is an uneven film that still leaves you respecting its real-life inspiration.