I, Tonya (2017)
Few sports controversies have lodged themselves in the public imagination quite like the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a moment so bizarre and theatrical that it almost beggared belief even as it was happening. A kneecapping, a rink-side wail, a disgraced champion, and a cast of supporting conspirators who looked like they had wandered in from a Coen Brothers pitch meeting: the whole affair played out like tabloid fiction dressed up as reality. Tonya Harding, the gifted but perpetually embattled figure skater at the centre of the storm, spent the following decades carrying a reputation that had been flattened into a single, convenient headline. Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya (2017) arrived with the stated intention of complicating that headline, offering a version of events drawn from conflicting firsthand accounts and asking the audience to sit with the discomfort of never quite knowing where the truth lies. It is a film as interested in the mechanics of storytelling as it is in the facts of the case.
Gillespie, an Australian director perhaps best known at that point for the quietly strange Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and the slick but workmanlike Million Dollar Arm (2014), found unexpected gear with this project. The screenplay, written by Steven Rogers, leans into a fractured, mockumentary-adjacent structure, presenting talking-head interviews with fictionalised versions of the real participants alongside dramatised sequences that occasionally contradict each other mid-scene. It is a formally ambitious choice, and one that sits comfortably alongside other recent biopics that have played fast and loose with chronology and reliability (films like Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood demonstrate how much mileage a confident director can get from period reconstruction). Produced through LuckyChap Entertainment, the production company co-founded by lead actress Margot Robbie, and Clubhouse Pictures, the film had a relatively modest budget that belies the polish of its period recreation, from the rinkside costumes to the gloriously on-brand heavy metal soundtrack.
The cast is where the film really announces itself. Margot Robbie, who has shown considerable range across wildly different projects (see Macca's thoughts on her work in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey), takes on Tonya Harding as a role that demands both physical credibility on the ice and an emotional rawness that could easily tip into caricature. She is supported by Allison Janney as LaVona Golden, Harding's mother, a performance that collected the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and has rather deservedly become the thing people reach for when the film comes up in conversation. Sebastian Stan plays Jeff Gillooly, Harding's abusive ex-husband, bringing a sulky, self-serving plausibility to a man who remains convinced, even in retrospect, that things were not quite his fault. And Paul Walter Hauser, as the deluded, bumbling Shawn Eckhardt, the man who fancied himself an international counterintelligence operative and ended up organising one of the most famously botched criminal plans in sporting history, is frankly extraordinary: the kind of performance that makes you wish the actor had been a household name far sooner than he became one.
I didn't know what to expect going into Craig Gillespie’s 2017 film I, Tonya. I was only a toddler when the whole Nancy Kerrigan incident made global headlines, so while I was familiar with the name and knew Tonya Harding was a phenomenal figure skater, that was the absolute extent of my knowledge. Going into this, I genuinely thought it was going to be "just a skating movie". I was wrong. Very wrong. What Gillespie has actually delivered is an incredibly interesting, darkly comedic character study that I could never have predicted, completely subverting the standard, dry sports biopic formula.
The casting is nothing short of inspired, with the ensemble delivering absolute gold. Margot Robbie plays Tonya Harding and she absolutely nails the physical and emotional nuances of the role. This is probably the best Margot Robbie performance I've seen to date, and I already love her chaotic energy as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. She is brilliantly matched by Allison Janney, who plays her monstrous mother LaVona. Janney is darkly funny in a wonderfully twisted kind of way, chewing the scenery and stealing every scene she's in. The ensemble is perfectly rounded out by Paul Walter Hauser as Shawn, the hapless mastermind behind the infamous attack. He is quickly becoming one of my absolute favourite actors to watch on screen, right up there with his brilliant turn in Americana.
Beyond the stellar performances, what really elevates the picture is the underlying emotional core and the brilliant directorial flair. There's a huge, unexpected sense of pride that you feel watching Tonya Harding claw her way up from an impoverished, abusive background to overcome the odds and do it entirely her way. She’s essentially a working-class redneck blasting a heavy metal soundtrack while executing triple axels, and as someone who appreciates doing things your own way regardless of what the snooty establishment thinks, I really feel that.
Gillespie uses a fantastic mockumentary style to let the characters speak directly to the camera, which only adds to the chaotic charm of the narrative and keeps you completely hooked.
Overall, I was so incredibly happy that I was wrong about this film. What I assumed would be a straightforward, perhaps slightly boring ice-skating movie ended up being a real, unadulterated delight. It’s a sharp, hilarious, and surprisingly moving piece of cinema that takes a real-life tabloid tragedy and turns it into a brilliant piece of entertainment.
I, Tonya is an absolute triumph that proves you can take the most infamous scandal in sports history and turn it into a genuinely brilliant, must-watch movie.
I, Tonya occupies an interesting space in the recent wave of real-life dramatisations: it is neither hagiography nor hit piece, and it earns considerable credit for that restraint. It also arrives as a reminder that the sports biopic genre, so often polished but unremarkable, can do something genuinely alive when it trusts its subject to be morally complicated. Whether you come to it knowing every detail of the Kerrigan incident or, like many younger viewers, only a rough outline, the film has the good sense to treat its audience as adults who can hold sympathy and scepticism at the same time. For a story that the world thought it had already finished laughing at, that is no small achievement. Sometimes the films you expect the least from are the ones that stay with you longest.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-07-03
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for I, Tonya (2017) on YouTube
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