Two years before the Flint Water Crisis became national news, a teenage boxer named Claressa Shields, who was born and raised in Flint, won a gold medal at the London Olympics. It was 2012, the first year that women could box at the Olympics, and at 17, Shields was the youngest boxer there. She blew the competition away — and four years later, she’d do it again, becoming the only American boxer, regardless of gender, to pull off that feat.
Shields (played by an excellent Ryan Destiny) is at the center of “The Fire Inside,” directed by Rachel Morrison from a screenplay by Barry Jenkins. At first you might be tricked into thinking it’s a standard-issue inspirational sports movie, the young athlete with a rough background beating the odds and coming out on top.
But “The Fire Inside” has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie. For one, it has Brian Tyree Henry, one of the greatest actors working today, as Shield’s coach Jason Crutchfield. Jason volunteers at the boxing gym while working a day job at a cable company to support his family and, at first, resists training Claressa — she’s a girl, after all, and the gym doesn’t train girls. But she persists, and he sees that spark. This boxer is not like the others.
Their relationship is what powers the movie — “The Fire Inside” is as much about Jason as about Claressa — and it grows over time, from coach and athlete to something both more vital and more combative. Jason sees in Claressa something of himself: a kid from a poor family who has the drive, and the talent, to prove herself worthy. He wants her to have a different life, a better one.
Her mother, Jackie (Olunike Adeliyi), is supportive but erratic, the sort of parent who buys cereal when the cabinets have gone completely empty but forgets the milk. She brings a string of strange men into the house, too. And so Claressa finds herself caring for and protecting her younger siblings more than any child should have to do. Jason understands all of this, and his instincts to both protect and push Claressa drive their connection, which starts at some point to feel more like a partnership. It is tender and contentious and loyal, and it’s beautiful.
That’s where the narrative warmth comes from in “The Fire Inside.” But another ingredient in its secret sauce is Morrison — who in 2018 became the first woman to garner a best cinematography nomination at the Oscars (for “Mudbound”). This kind of kinetic movie needed someone with a strong visual sense. A persistent issue in movies about boxing or wrestling, sports that take place in a defined ring, is legibility: It can be tough to follow what’s going on in the ring. Punches, swings, grappling and sweat — they can blend together, and you’re left just waiting for the fight to end so you can find out who won.
Morrison, however, knows just how to set these scenes up visually. They gain extraordinary emotional weight since you’re not constantly trying to figure out what you’re looking at. She knows how to make repetition interesting, too: A boxing tournament can be shot as a series of fights, one after another, but instead Morrison opts to shoot as one smooth, seamless fight in which the opponents keep changing. It’s an elegant and exciting solution that sustains energy and builds tension — and it’s satisfying to watch, too.
Yet all of this could still lean a little too conventional, a little too corny. One of the problems with Hollywood sports movies is they tend to climax with the win, and leave you thinking it’s all roses from now on for the winner.
“The Fire Inside” does something else, because Claressa — certainly a winner, and a remarkable one at that — did not meet the same fame and fortune as, say, her Olympic teammate Michael Phelps, whose goggled face was on Wheaties boxes. What’s so smart about “The Fire Inside” is its structure: Jenkins’s screenplay places her big win around the end of the second act. Watching it, you can feel the big moment coming — all of Flint is watching her on TV, Jason is hollering from the stands — and also have no idea what will happen next.
Without spoiling Act 3 of “The Fire Inside,” I can confidently tell you this is what makes this movie work so well. This is not the tale of an individual; it’s about a community and also a system that’s stacked against people like Claressa. People don’t want to see women boxers, agents tell Jason and Claressa. There’s just not money there, the biggest win that both of them were expecting.
It’s just another brick in the wall that life has been erecting in Claressa’s path — a wall that’s been building since she was born. Her absent father; her chaotic mother; her personal, hidden traumas. Morrison smartly suggests another one visually, though you’ll have to be paying attention to catch it: The Flint Water Tower appears in establishing shots multiple times, reminding us that while all this is happening, a crisis is developing. If it’s not one thing, it’s another — and being an Olympic gold medalist won’t pay for your nephew’s diapers.
So the question the film presents is this: What if you win, and it seems like it doesn’t matter? What if the world doesn’t value your kind of winning?
As it happened, I first saw “The Fire Inside” a few weeks after a firestorm of ringside speculation and controversy during the 2024 Olympics over the gender of Imane Khelif, the women’s boxing gold medalist. It was clear that these two stories were the same tale, one in which female athletes, especially women of color, face incredible hurdles in “unfeminine” sports, roadblocks based on cultural prejudices and hangups. Contemporary sports coverage — especially during the Olympics — relies on telling inspiring stories so audiences connect with the athletes. But stories can be a double-edged sword.
This fact is subtly woven throughout “The Fire Inside,” and it’s magnified in Shields’s story: If you don’t come from privilege, what happens when you fight your way to the top, only to realize that it looks a lot like where you started? In this case, the answer this movie gives is both simple and unthinkable: You just have to keep fighting. Claressa Shields did. What choice did she have?
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