The story of Flint Olympian Claressa "T-Rex" Shields, The Fire Inside marks the feature-length directorial debut of Black Panther cinematographer Rachel Morrison. The boxing drama, written by Moonlight's Barry Jenkins, follows the ebb and flow of a traditional sports biopic right up until it doesn't, before branching out in unexpected ways. However, its story beats are often restrained and awkward, resulting in a film that never fully blooms.
This is especially a shame considering its magnificent lead performances, from Grown-ish star Ryan Destiny as the formidable Shields, and Brian Tyree Henry as her diligent coach, Jason Crutchfield. Both actors bring tremendous nuance and passion to their roles, turning Shields and Crutchfield into fully formed characters whose interpersonal drama remains enticing throughout, even when it feels hampered by the film's construction. It is, both fittingly and unfortunately, a work at odds with itself, making it a strangely perfect embodiment of the story it tells.
Formerly titled Flint Strong, the film is as much about Shields' Michigan hometown as it is about the Olympian boxer. Few sports movies outside of the Philadelphia-based Rocky have so deftly captured the relationship between a person and a place. Given her rough upbringing, Shields' dreams are often at odds with reality, which makes for a solid dramatic foundation.
Flint may have entered the mainstream consciousness after its water crisis came to light in 2014, but the meat of Shields' story unfolds in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, and tells of a place already suffering from economic downturn. The movie's prologue introduces a precocious, tomboyish Shields trying to force her way into Crutchfield's all-boys boxing gym, and while the volunteer coach is initially hesitant, advice from his headstrong wife Mickey (De'Adre Aziza) makes him reconsider his gendered stance.
As the years go by, Crutchfield remains in Shields' corner, often to his own financial detriment, but his belief in the young prodigy goes hand in hand with her sense of self-worth. After all, given her fractured home life, her coach's mentorship is the closest thing she has to parental guidance. Her father is in prison, and while her mother Jackie (Olunike Adeliyi) is physically present, she's always emotionally elsewhere, leaving the teenage Shields to raise her two younger siblings.
When the prospect of national (and international) competition arises, Shields and Crutchfield go into overdrive and begin knocking down records and barriers, but navigating the larger sports world is a matter of delicate politics. Winning turns out to not just be about punching, but about facing unspoken racial animus and paradoxical notions of femininity — about embodying a traditional "daintiness" outside the ring, despite the sport's rough, seemingly masculine demands. All these challenges make for intriguing drama during Shields' travels. However, her larger challenges remain in Flint, and continue long after her sporting success.
Where most sports movies might climax in an athlete's initial rise to fame, The Fire Inside practically transforms into its own sequel. It devotes its second half to what's demanded of American sportswomen behind the scenes, especially Black sportswomen, who may not be given the same support structures as their white and/or male peers despite their achievements.
This structure sets the film apart from its contemporaries, turning it into a larger sociocultural examination, while forcing its two leads to undergo rigorous changes — as individuals, and as a unit. However, the main issue afflicting The Fire Inside is that its many setups rarely result in deft dramatic payoffs. The pieces are all there, but they seldom form a satisfying bigger picture.
In the director's chair, Morrison — who shot Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station and Dee Rees' Mudbound — retains her eye for accentuating moment-to-moment drama. Along with cinematographer Rina Yang, she maintains a sense of place, mood and momentum with every shot, but rarely do her scenes culminate in moments that are appropriately rousing, depressing, amusing, or even just curiosity-piquing.
The in-ring combat is captured with a proclivity for motion and impact, with shots and sequences that create a lucid sense of time and physicality. Isolate any stretch of 30 to 60 seconds, and The Fire Inside seems like one of the greatest movies ever made. But at length, it's one of the most disappointingly assembled works of its kind. It creates the anticipation of joy, of success, of loss, and of anguish, but when it comes time to pull the trigger, it misfires.
There's a distinct dullness to each micro-climax, rendering the experience of watching the movie one of disappointment and deflation, even when the text and on-screen imagery are geared towards maximum impact. It's a film whose rhythms frequently come undone, in large part because it refuses to luxuriate in the cinematic pleasures (and even displeasures) that it constantly builds towards.
However, that The Fire Inside remains a decently enjoyable prestige biopic despite its baffling construction is a testament to its performances.
Every step of the way, the two leads of The Fire Inside deliver deeply considered performances that bring their characters to life. They're so good at what they do (and Morrison is so adept at guiding them towards their emotional objectives) that their skills are almost a detriment to the film's eventual, lopsided form. At every turn, they fill you with the hope and belief that what you're watching might amount to something great, rather than merely passable.
Destiny's fearless physicality is an enormous part of this. The actress is constantly at war not only with the world around her but with Shields' very sense of being, a method of moving through the world that, despite radiating toughness, becomes a double-edged sword, thanks to the mechanics of sponsorship and media visibility. And yet, the character's fortitude is also at odds with her own vulnerabilities, and the way she exhibits an innocent, girlish excitement amidst her teenage romance with a fellow Flint trainee.
Henry, meanwhile, offers yet another masterclass in thoughtful performance, as a man struggling to leave his mark on the world by living vicariously through another person. The film never quite gets into the weeds of Crutchfield all but replacing his own daughter with Shields while the former is away at college, but Henry's approach to the story — his seeming awareness of its themes and its trajectory — ensure that each moment of internal and external drama is buoyed by conflicting questions of fatherhood. In fact, Crutchfield's story is just as much about the social and racial expectations of gender as Shields' is, given his constant war between what's expected of him as a man (and as a father) and what he's capable of achieving on his own, as a person bound by oppressive economic circumstances.
Morrison's debut may have missed the mark, but it features all the makings of something that could have been great. There's a real sense of passion, and a detailed understanding of social mechanics that she often translates into dramatic moments, even though they seldom add up to anything satisfying.
