At a Toronto festival strangely heavy on middling dramas about either wrestlers (Unstoppable, uplifting yet routine) or boxers (The Cut, downbeat yet ridiculous), it’s easy to forget just how thrilling a combat sports movie can be when it’s done well. Back in 2015, Ryan Coogler’s transcendent Rocky reboot Creed was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that it not only refreshed a franchise but it awoke an entire genre. And while he retreated to producer for the two sequels, the franchise provided a new, updated blueprint on how to perfect a boxing story.
While his sometime cinematographer Rachel Morrison might not have worked with him on the Creed movies, it feels as if she’s used what she has learned from their working relationship (she shot Fruitvale Station and Black Panther) to help inform her directorial debut, electrifying true story drama The Fire Inside. Morrison made history a few years back becoming the first woman to ever receive an Oscar nomination for cinematography (still genuinely staggering that it took this long), and so she’s highly aware of what it takes to make her mark in a male-dominated field. One can see why she was then so taken with the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a young Black woman who fought her way from an impoverished home in Flint, Michigan, all the way to the 2012 Olympics, where she became the first US woman to ever win a gold medal for boxing at the age of just 17.
Her story is obviously astounding in itself, but what makes The Fire Inside, once called Flint Strong, such an upper-tier sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins don’t rely solely on the facts of her life to compel. This is not mere Wikipedia summary storytelling – this is a living, breathing drama of real people and real emotions and one that therefore has real heft to it.
Shields, played by the singer-actor Ryan Destiny, is ready to fight. Living on the breadline in a rundown neighbourhood in Flint (a city that had been facing crises long before the 2014 water crisis) with a difficult and distracted mother and her two younger siblings, she’s a firework waiting to be let off. She finds release with her coach Jason (Brian Tyree Henry) who years earlier, broke tradition and let her into his boys-only club. Despite all that’s stacked against her, she’s confident in her ability to be the best and when a chance to compete for the Olympics comes up, the two spring into action.
There’s a great deal here that rises above what we’ve come to expect from a standard issue genre, usually defined by hoary tropes and insistent string-pulling. Given Morrison’s background, it’s no shock that the film looks sensational, thanks also to the Euphoria and Taylor Swift cinematographer Rina Yang, who really captures the bitter cold of a Michigan winter while also the sleek and dynamic thrill of a high-stakes Olympic boxing match (this is an Amazon-MGM movie that looks more MGM than Amazon). Jenkins, whose script is based on the 2015 PBS documentary T-Rex, is also a more emotionally intelligent writer than most and adds detail to formula that has grown to be overly familiar, turning stock characters into humans no matter how uncomfortable and contradictory they might then be.
Shields was essentially just a kid when she suddenly found herself on a global stage (often fighting women twice her age) and Jenkins shows us just how difficult that was not just for her but also those around, her coach forced into a parental role with an often frustratingly surly and ungrateful teen. As she gets closer to gold, we also see the impossible expectations for a female athlete, driven by a love for the sport but then required to neatly fit into a more palatable category for the media and for brands who may potentially sponsor, a feminine smile suddenly more important than excelling in the ring. It’s an early clue, as Shields is gently educated on the lay of the land, that this is not going to go down the way we might expect.
The stakes are so much perilously higher for Shields, speeding to the top with the promise that she will be returning to the bottom with money for all, a bright hope at a time when many around her lived in darkness. The rousing 2012 victory is then not the end of the story – instead we return to Flint six months later to see just how impossible it is for her to monetise as a female Olympian and move on. It’s a fascinatingly bleak but believable extension to the story that elevates The Fire Inside from mere sports drama to something far richer. Winning isn’t enough in a system that didn’t really expect, or want, you to win in the first place.
It’s a film that inspires and then enrages and gives its two central performers a tough emotional rollercoaster to ride, going all the way up before they come all the way down. Destiny, a charismatic actor with only a handful of credits including Lee Daniels’s Empire follow-up Star, is a real find, nailing a teenager’s heady and head-scratching emotions while also making us believe she’s a force to be feared in the ring. Ice Cube was once attached to the role of coach but, mercifully, dropped out, the far broader actor allowing Brian Tyree Henry, someone with far greater range and sensitivity, to step in. It’s another wonderful, studied performance from an actor who deserves to add another best supporting actor nomination to his belt, pitch perfect as a man trying to figure out how and when to meter out tough love and support. The scenes between the pair really crackle as they come together and also fall apart.
The real-life victories by Shields and her coach were not easy, both pre- and post- Olympics, and what really makes The Fire Inside soar is that Morrison works just as hard to win us over.
The Fire Inside is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in the US on 25 December with a UK release to be announced
