In the coming months, there will be a lot of noise about it girl Sydney Sweeney’s transformation into boxer Christy Martin for David Michôd’s biopic Christy. A spoiler is proffered by this genial, roundly entertaining indie, which arrives with little fanfare yet goes on to demonstrate all any film requires is a good yarn and the right jobbing performers in place. It’s one of those stories you can’t believe hasn’t been filmed before: that of Mildred “Millie” Burke (played here by Emily Bett Rickards), a single mother and diner waitress who in the postwar era became America’s first millionaire sportswoman under the sobriquet of “the Kansas Cyclone”, first lady of the nascent all-girl wrestling scene.
At a more confident moment, such material might have yielded a major studio vehicle perhaps for Demi Moore or Angelina Jolie. In this economy, a modest stipend has been afforded director Ash Avildsen (son of the late Rocky director John G Avildsen) to fashion something resembling a superior telemovie. Part of the fun is that Mildred and trainer/manager/on-off beau Billy “the Big Bad” Wolfe (Josh Lucas) are having to invent a sport on the hoof, girl-on-girl combat having been proscribed in certain states, with stuffed shirts convinced this just isn’t a woman’s place. The script – by Avildsen and Alston Ramsay, parsing Jeff Leen’s biography – has one pointed, self-sustaining running joke: wherever Mildred fights, the audience is full of contemporaries looking to unleash frustrated energies.
Avildsen makes the 1950s look quietly and unfussily handsome, casting people who look the part. Small-screen face Rickards (Arrow, The Flash) and double Kelly Phelan more than hold their own amid the grappling action, while Lucas – a movie star like they used to make – offers a terrific heel turn as a glorified carnival barker rattled by Mildred’s success. Avildsen is prone to luxuriating in his own Americana – the midsection is somewhat baggy – and you sometimes sense the writing tiptoeing around the wrestling scene’s less salubrious aspects. The stronger stretches, though, display ample pluck and moxie; if you’ve missed that genus of spinning-headline movies where men address women as “toots”, this one’s for you.
• Queen of the Ring is in UK cinemas from 19 September and on digital platforms from 13 October.
