Last fall, I got up early on a Sunday morning and trekked down to Tribeca for an early screening of Christy, a biopic about female boxer Christy Martin. Plenty of movies screen early and often for critics as they jockey for positions in the annual end-of-year awards-season race – though not all of them bring a famous sex symbol out to talk up her movie to a bunch of nerdy writers and media types. But Sydney Sweeney did indeed grace us with her presence after the film to talk about her process, her performance, and her love for the real-life Christy Martin. She didn’t talk about wanting to score an Oscar nomination, of course, but you don’t show up to chat about your movie for an audience of 100 on a Sunday morning if you haven’t been told some symbolic gold might be in the cards.
That’s not how it worked out for Christy. The movie didn’t get any closer to Oscar glory than The Smashing Machine, another movie-star-gets-serious fighting biopic that beat it to theaters by a month but left Dwayne Johnson empty-handed. (Actually, The Smashing Machine did get a makeup nomination, so it got a great deal closer to Oscar glory.) And like that movie, Christy bombed out commercially, too. Despite a wide release from indie distributor Black Bear, it grossed less than The Testament of Ann Lee, a far less conventional biopic with Amanda Seyfried, Sweeney’s holiday-season co-star in The Housemaid. That movie appeared to be more in her wheelhouse: a glossy and sexy thriller that arrived at its R rating with a bit more fun than Christy.
But sports narratives love a comeback, and Christy has indeed sprinted back onto the charts, albeit the somewhat less lucrative HBO Max streaming Top 10. It’s joined there by another Serious Sydney movie: Reality, the HBO docudrama about American intelligence leaker Reality Winner.
HBO is the natural home for these less mainstream Sweeney projects, and the timing makes sense; the channel just debuted the long-awaited, long-delayed third season of Euphoria, the buzzy not-so-teenage-anymore drama that gave Sweeney and several other stars a big break. It also, albeit coincidentally, turns HBO Max into a kind of alternate universe for Sweeney, where she’s better known as an edgy actress than the torch-bearer for genres (rom-com; erotic thriller) previously presumed dead. Both pursuits are worthy, but it is striking how much rangier Sweeney is than her bombshell image.
As far as actorly transformations, Christy is the more conventional version: Sweeney isn’t immediately recognizable with her shaggy non-blonde curls and muscles, and did the standard heavy training to get herself in the athlete’s physical and head space for the film. The movie follows familiar underdog-story beats, and even feels relatively cautious in its exploration of her queerness. (Martin eventually married a woman, played in the movie by Katy O’Brian.) But on its chosen level of mainstream true-story rise-and-fall-and-rise biography, its fundamentals are strong; director David Michôd is far less of a brand name than Smashing Machine’s Benny Safdie, but it’s a more satisfying movie overall.
Christy also packs a surprisingly brutal punch for anyone unfamiliar with Martin’s story, especially her relationship with her trainer (played by Ben Foster, one-upping Sweeney as far as the unrecognizable factor goes; I literally did not recognize him until halfway through the movie), which takes a turn I’d describe as broadly predictable but specifically shocking. It’s fine that this movie didn’t net Sweeney an Oscar nomination; there are plenty of great lead performances every year, and it’s hard to argue that she deserved a lot over any of the most recent chosen five. But it’s not shameless awards-baiting, either, or at least it’s not only that; as in The Housemaid, Sweeney shows a knack for playing characters who have known poverty and desperation. Maybe because she doesn’t come from a wealthy or famous family, the affect sometimes mistaken for flat reads, in the right role, as someone who’s been told (whether directly or not) to keep her head down and stay in line.
In Reality, Sweeney is playing another real-life character, this one who’s more consciously attempting to perform to that expectation of obedience, despite already having stuck her neck out. The film has a far more limited scope than the years’ worth of story Christy tells. It unfolds in something close to real time as the title character talks to FBI agents who are searching her home and eventually interrogating her about the leak of a government document. It takes all of its dialogue from actual transcripts of this event, giving tight parameters for the actors – mainly Sweeney and stage/film vet Josh Hamilton – as they move from uncomfortable small talk to the heart of the matter. The film is based on a play, and while director Tina Satter (who also wrote the stage version) stays true to that stripped-down aesthetic, she does add some cinematic flourishes, like images that glitch out whenever the characters talk about a subject that’s been redacted from the transcript.
Mostly, though, the movie focuses on Sweeney and Hamilton – their body language, their ebbing and flowing politeness, as the precariousness of Reality’s situation becomes clear in parallel with a growing and empathetic understanding of why she leaked classified information in the first place. Sweeney dresses down for the role, matching the less glammed-up real-life Reality, but she doesn’t need to hide her familiar face to make the part her own, and plenty convincing. She dresses down with her offhand manner, her quiet nervousness about the safety of her dog and cat, her worried eyes.
It’s fascinating to picture some of Sweeney’s fans turning to this after Euphoria, which has always seemed very knowing, sometimes uncomfortably so, about the sexualized, pin-up aspect of her image (and probably helped create it), as well as in the wake of the news that’s swirled around her supposed political affiliation. In Reality, she plays a sympathetic whistleblower in the matter of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in 2016. In Christy, she plays a female athlete who escapes the horrific abuse of her male trainer and eventually marries a woman. Neither part of “MAGA Barbie” really enters into these movies. But for now, that side of her remains a kind of streaming-only B-side to movies like Anyone But You or The Housemaid. Christy may not have won her an Oscar nomination, but having it sit alongside Euphoria on the virtual shelves may boost Sweeney’s cred anyway.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.