I, Tonya

The thing about "I, Tonya" is you kind of go in expecting a standard sports biopic and end up with this madcap collision between tabloid infamy and sly, fourth-wall-breaking docudrama. Margot Robbie’s performance as Tonya Harding is honestly the main event. She manages to hit the prickly, desperate, and absurdly tough edges without begging for sympathy — Tonya’s often unlikable, but you get her. The film never quite lets you settle into a single tone. One moment, it's anarchic dark comedy; the next, it's devastating, and, occasionally, just deeply weird.

Director Craig Gillespie is clearly having fun riffing on "the unreliable narrator" shtick, with multiple characters contradicting each other straight to the camera. It’s chaotic, but it fits the notorious, contradictory tabloid circus surrounding Harding in the '90s. The Rashomon-style storytelling keeps things feeling fresh and unpredictable. There’s a sharpness to the script that made me chuckle, even as the events — domestic violence, class prejudice, and media cruelty — hit uncomfortably hard.

Tonally, though, the film can feel like it’s skating on thin ice. Sometimes, the comedy undercuts the real pain of Harding’s life — Allison Janney is biting and hilarious as Tonya’s monstrous mother, a role that probably earned her the Oscar in the first ten minutes, but the laughs can come at the expense of empathy. There's just a whiff of the filmmakers wanting to have their cake and eat it too: using Tonya for punchlines, but then asking us to care.

The pacing, thankfully, rarely drags. Gillespie cuts quickly and uses music in a way that gets genuinely infectious — needle drops like Supertramp and Fleetwood Mac set this grimy fairytale spinning. Some sequences (like the infamous triple axel) are shot with a kinetic, almost Scorsese-like swagger; others, especially the talking-head interviews, drift close to parody but never cross the line fully.

As for emotional heft, I wasn’t always as moved as I felt I should be, given the mess Harding’s life becomes. The script’s sense of irony and spectacle sometimes distances us from her trauma — but at its best, especially in smaller, quieter moments between Robbie and Janney, the film finds genuine pathos within the circus. If you remember the tabloid headlines or grew up with that incident in the air, "I, Tonya" is bound to hit differently; if you don’t, it’s still a wild ride.

It’s not a perfect film, but it’s never boring — more interested in ambiguity and contradictions than playing it safe. You get the sense that, beneath all the showmanship, there’s something dark, frustrated, and true: an American outlaw story cloaked in sequins.