In an unglamorous community gym, two women sit opposite each other on plastic fold-out chairs. One of them is dressed in a corporate pantsuit, with shiny bobbed blonde hair. Her eyes lock with the boxer Claressa Shields. “We would love you to stop saying that you love hitting people and making them cry,” she says.
In 2012, Shields, a 17 year-old from Michigan, became the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. In her own words, she did it by being a bully. First time director Rachel Morrison finds an interesting, provocative tension between the grit and swagger Shields needed to overpower her opponents, and the placid, smiling humility expected of female winners. It’s a tension that hits differently as female athletes of colour, such as the Armenian boxer Imane Khelif and the South African middle distance runner Caster Semenya, face scrutiny (and outright discrimination) for being the wrong kind of champion.
It would have been easy for Morrison to fashion a biopic of the girlboss variety. In fact, the film is closer to Steve James’s nonfiction basketball epic Hoop Dreams than an inspirational sports drama like Ali or Creed. Morrison’s twist on the genre is to show the aftermath as well as the victory.
Morrison is a gifted cinematographer, and was the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for her craft (for 2017’s underrated drama Mudbound). She is a visual storyteller first – one who understands that the appeal of boxing is in witnessing the power and precision of a punch. Fight scenes are staged with kinetic energy and clarity, the camera whipping around all four corners of the ring and bracing for impact.
Ryan Destiny portrays Shields with steely charisma, charting her character’s rise and triumph with volunteer coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) staunchly by her side. We see her determination to transcend her circumstances, and her frustration as she struggles to escape them.
Shields grew up in poverty in the postindustrial Midwestern city of Flint (some years before its well-publicised water crisis of 2014), a fact that Morrison and writer Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) are careful not to treat as a tragedy. We see a young Shields returning home to empty cupboards, the kitchen in disarray. Hungry, she climbs into the bed she shares with her two younger siblings. But there are no character assassinations to be found here. It’s a gesture of kindness when Morrison cuts to a clean kitchen the next morning, warm light illuminating a box of branded cereal as Shields’ mother Jackie (Olunike Adeliyi) sleepily frets that she’s forgotten to buy any milk. Jackie is not a bad person, but she can’t be relied on.
When her gloves are off, Destiny plays Shields as skittish, surly and uncomfortable, qualities that translate awkwardly in post-match interviews. Morrison never lets us forget just how young her heroine is. Grown-woman toughness in the ring is punctured by a wobbly ride home on a crush’s handlebars, or a giddy moment in a foreign hotel room alone. Shields knows her win would be a ray of hope for her entire community. It’s a lot for a teenager to carry.
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“Does what I did even count?” she asks her boyfriend, six months after winning gold. She has landed zero endorsement deals, something we see breaking her heart in real time as she rushes to the supermarket to buy nappies for her infant nephew. Her eyes land on a packet of Wheaties, branded with the face of other Olympians. The Fire Inside challenges the narrative that fame always begets fortune. At her lowest point, Shields takes her medal to a pawn shop (Shields has said in interviews that this didn’t actually happen, though she considered throwing it in the nearby river). In a moment of dramatic Hollywood intervention, a customer recognises the athlete in the nick of time, convincing her not to sell it. Morrison doesn’t deny the symbolic power of Shields’ win, but she doesn’t oversell the material benefits of that win, either.
If the movie sounds like a bummer, it’s really not. Atlanta’s Tyree Henry’s natural jovial warmth makes him a perfect foil for Shields’ cool reserve; their banter is a joy to watch. It’s worth noting that Crutchfield’s life didn’t transform either. Unable to quit his day job as a utility worker to train Shields full time, the ex-fighter listens to one of her matches while balanced on a ladder. And though he takes Shields in when things with her mother become strained, he also has his own family to look after. Tyree Henry manages to emanate goodness, without becoming a cuddly cliché.
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