Everyone knows the story. Or thinks they do. In January 1994, Nancy Kerrigan was attacked before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, and the trail led back to Tonya Harding’s ex-husband and his spectacularly incompetent associates. What followed was a media circus that turned Harding into America’s favorite villain: the trash-talking, chain-smoking skater from the wrong side of Portland who didn’t belong in the sport’s genteel world. Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya takes that familiar narrative and tears it apart, presenting competing versions of events from people who all insist they’re telling the truth and none of whom fully are.
Margot Robbie plays Harding from her teenage years through the scandal and its aftermath, and the film structures itself as a series of contradictory interviews with the key players. Harding remembers events one way. Her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, played by Sebastian Stan, remembers them differently. Her mother LaVona, played by Allison Janney, has yet another version. The film doesn’t try to reconcile these accounts. It lets them pile up, creating a portrait not of what happened but of how everyone involved processed, justified, and repackaged what happened.
Robbie’s Harding and Janney’s Magnificent Cruelty
Margot Robbie disappears into the role in a way that her movie-star presence might not suggest is possible. Her Tonya is fierce, wounded, proud, and self-deluding in measures that shift from scene to scene. The skating sequences, which blend Robbie’s own training with visual effects, are thrilling, but the performance’s real power lives in the smaller moments: Tonya applying makeup before a competition with the same intensity she brings to a triple axel, or the way her face crumbles when judges give her scores she knows are unfair. Robbie finds the specific hurt of a person who was never going to be accepted no matter how well she performed.
Allison Janney’s LaVona is one of the great screen villains of recent years, and her Oscar win for the role was richly deserved. LaVona is a monster: verbally abusive, physically violent, manipulative, and utterly convinced that her cruelty is making her daughter stronger. Janney plays her with a deadpan relish that makes every scene she’s in both horrifying and darkly hilarious. The character could easily become a cartoon, but Janney grounds LaVona in a specific kind of blue-collar toughness that explains, without excusing, who she is. Her interview segments, delivered directly to camera with a bird on her shoulder and a drink in her hand, are the film’s most memorable scenes.
Sebastian Stan’s Gillooly is the film’s most tragic figure, a man who is clearly dangerous but also clearly pathetic. Stan plays him as someone who genuinely believed he was helping Tonya even as his actions destroyed her career. The domestic violence scenes between Gillooly and Harding are handled with a bluntness that refuses to look away but also doesn’t exploit the violence for dramatic effect. These scenes are ugly and fast, the way real violence is, and the film is smart enough to show how the cycle perpetuates without making excuses for anyone involved.
Gillespie’s direction keeps the energy high throughout, mixing the interview format with traditional narrative scenes in a way that keeps the audience engaged without feeling gimmicky. The soundtrack choices, heavy on ’70s and ’80s rock, give the film a propulsive energy that matches Harding’s personality. The ice-skating sequences are filmed with genuine excitement, and the film understands that Harding’s athletic achievements need to land for her story to resonate.
The Tonal Tightrope and Where It Wobbles
The film’s biggest challenge is also its defining feature: the tone. I, Tonya asks the audience to laugh at genuinely awful situations, including domestic abuse, class discrimination, and the destruction of a woman’s career by the men around her. Most of the time, Gillespie walks this line well. The humor comes from the absurdity of the people and situations rather than from the suffering itself. Jeff’s bodyguard Shawn, played by Paul Walter Hauser, is a compulsive liar whose delusions of grandeur led directly to the Kerrigan attack, and his scenes are funny because they expose the staggering incompetence that turned a stupid idea into an international scandal.
But the tonal balance doesn’t always hold. Some viewers find that the comedic approach diminishes the seriousness of the abuse Harding suffered, both from her mother and from Gillooly. When the film plays LaVona’s cruelty for laughs, which it frequently does, there’s a risk of normalizing behavior that caused real damage to a real person. The film acknowledges this tension through its fourth-wall-breaking structure, with characters occasionally stopping to tell the audience that they know what they’re seeing is disturbing, but that self-awareness doesn’t fully resolve the issue.
The film also struggles with the limits of its “everyone’s lying” conceit. By presenting all versions of events as equally unreliable, the film sometimes dodges the harder questions about accountability. What actually happened with the Kerrigan attack? The film is more interested in the ambiguity than in the answers, which works as a commentary on media narratives but can feel evasive when it comes to the real harm done to a real person who was assaulted.
The final act, covering the aftermath of the scandal and Harding’s banishment from skating, loses some momentum. The film is strongest when it’s juggling its competing narratives and staging its skating sequences. Once those elements are removed, what’s left is a more conventional story of downfall that doesn’t carry the same energy.
Truth Is Whatever You Can Sell
The most interesting thing I, Tonya does is reframe the Harding story as fundamentally about class. The film argues, persuasively, that Harding was punished not just for the Kerrigan incident but for being the wrong kind of skater: too loud, too rough, too visibly poor in a sport that prizes elegance and pedigree. The judges who marked her down for her costumes and her music, the commentators who sneered at her background, the public that was eager to believe the worst about her: all of these reactions were about class as much as they were about ice skating. The film doesn’t claim Harding is innocent. It claims the game was rigged before she even stepped on the ice, and that changes the shape of everything that followed.
Should You Watch I, Tonya?
If you enjoy darkly funny biographical films with outstanding performances and a willingness to mess with narrative convention, this delivers. Robbie and Janney alone make it worth watching, and the skating sequences are genuinely exciting. It’s also a smart entry point for anyone who remembers the scandal and wants to see a more complicated version of the story than the one that played out on television.
Skip it if the combination of domestic violence and comedy sounds inappropriate or uncomfortable. The film asks a lot of its audience in terms of tonal flexibility, and if you can’t get past laughing at scenes involving real abuse suffered by a real person, that’s a completely valid response. Also skip it if you’re looking for definitive answers about what happened, because the film is far more interested in questions than conclusions.
The Verdict on I, Tonya
I, Tonya succeeds as both entertainment and provocation, using humor and structural ambition to tell a story that most people thought they already knew. Margot Robbie proves she can carry a dramatic film with the same magnetism she brings to blockbusters, and Allison Janney creates a character so memorably awful that she steals every scene without apparent effort. The film’s tonal risks don’t always pay off, and its refusal to commit to a definitive version of events can frustrate viewers who want accountability alongside complexity. But as a portrait of how class, media, and institutional bias conspire to create villains, I, Tonya is sharp, entertaining, and more relevant than a movie about figure skating has any right to be.