Beautiful boxing drama The Fire Inside asks a crucial question: what happens after victory?
The Fire Inside is a sports biopic with the nerve to ask, “What happens after the win?” It’s a simple shift in emphasis, but an unexpectedly transformative one, which forces us to reckon with how shortsighted we can be in our assumptions that victory creates a certain kind of immortality. Its subject is Olympic boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny), from Flint, Michigan, who became the first American woman to win a gold medal in boxing, at the 2012 London Games. She was only 17.
But medals, alone, aren’t enough to live on. Athletes need endorsements. And Shields walked away from her triumph into the jaws of misogyny and, crucially, misogynoir, as a young Black woman who valued her strength and didn’t care to lie for the cameras. “I like to beat people up,” the film’s Shields responds when asked why she wants to box. Sponsors don’t want to hear that kind of authenticity. They’re after modelesque beach volleyball players, with winsome smiles and perfect manners. So no one came to call. Shields was left adrift.
These are observations that serve, in a way, as an instant giveaway as to the identity of the writer behind The Fire Inside: Barry Jenkins, whose films Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), and series The Underground Railroad (2021), embrace all that feels literary and magical, without ever sacrificing the shaky, unnatural rhythms of real life.
The film’s inky, soft beauty – in which an outdoor training session is gently cloaked in snow and corporate, competitive spaces glow unnervingly like sci-fi capsules – also hints at who’s behind the camera. It’s cinematographer Rachel Morrison, in her directorial debut. She was the first woman nominated for an Oscar in her field, for Mudbound (2017), and here hands cinematographer duties over to Rina Yang, who does wonderful work. There’s an intimacy to each fight, to how the camera spins around faces and fists.
We’re first introduced to Shields as a hardened little girl, who views boxing as her armour, as a way to steel herself for when she has to come home to a dirty kitchen, the hungry mouths of her younger siblings, and the mother (Oluniké Adeliyi’s Jackie) who loves in thorny, complicated ways. She turns up to the neighbourhood gym where former boxer Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) now mentors promising young talents for free, as a way to escape his day job installing cables. He’s never even considered the idea a girl might want to box. Still, she impresses him, and he takes her on as a student, as his heart melts in that tender, unshowy way that only Henry can achieve in his performances.
In fact, The Fire Inside owes a lot to how beautifully Henry and Destiny counterbalance each other. Crutchfield thrives in quiet observation, in how he immediately understands and adapts to the way Shields nervously leaps back when he swoops in for a congratulatory hug. Shields, meanwhile, is caught up in the internal battle between ordinary teen wants and needs, and the near-machine engine drive of her ambitions. At one point, she’s frustrated by the fact that, yes, she won, but that she should have won by a bigger margin. Crutchfield coaxes out Shields’s tenderness; Shields ignites Crutchfield’s passion for the sport. The Fire Inside embraces the whole spectrum, of what’s true in life and in cinema.
Dir: Rachel Morrison. Starring: Ryan Destiny, Brian Tyree Henry, Oluniké Adeliyi, De'Adre Aziza, and Adam Clark. Cert 12A, 109 mins
