mafabet ‘The Fire Inside’ Review: When the Fight Isn’t in the Ring

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.

More than a third of those who became ill required hospitalization, suffering symptoms ranging from vomiting to loss of consciousness, seizures and hallucinations.

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.

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