Rachel Morrison's The Fire Inside opens with a wintry scene set in Flint, Michigan, which the film depicts as the sort of place which could certainly do with being Made Great Again. It nearly always seems to be snowing, for one thing. Often found running about in Flint is Claressa Shields (mostly played by Ryan Destiny), for the cold weather does not bother her as it does us lesser mortals (possibly this is the real advantage to having some Fire Inside).

When she is not running around Flint, Michigan, Claressa Shields is usually in a gym practising how to pummel people violently about the head, for she is a devoted boxer, despite having atypically short arms for a practitioner of the sweet science (for this reason she goes by the nickname 'T-Rex', which did make me laugh). Helping her in this is her coach and mentor Jason Crutchfield (this is Brian Tyree Henry, doing another of those slightly offbeat father figures who are almost becoming his stock-in-trade).

I should make clear that all of this is happening a few years back. After a somewhat dispensable prologue set in 2006, most of the film happens a few years later, in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. At this point American boxing was also in need of being Made Great Again, as US fighters appeared to have lost the knack of hitting other people in the head with sufficient gusto. Could it be that Caressa is the girl to point the way (with her very short arms) to a new pugilistic dawn? Well, maybe.

A little more grit is sprinkled over what is already feeling like a rather familiar tale as we learn more of Caressa's personal circumstances: her father is a regular guest at the Big House, her mother is an, erm, generously keen hostess to gentlemen callers, and Caressa and her siblings are living in the kind of poverty where pouring water on one's cornflakes is often a necessity. To be honest – and this is not to belittle the lived experience of the real Caressa Shields, for this is a true story, or at least as true as Hollywood sports movies ever get – it almost seems like the kind of ghetto cartoon that American History satirised so smartly last year.

Anyway, after punching someone in the head a lot at a big local event, Caressa is packed off to China where the Olympic qualifiers will soon be taking place, but Jason is not allowed to go with her as he is not an officially certified coach. (The general uselessness of the US boxing authorities – my words, not the script's – when it comes to supporting Caressa Shields or even recognising her talent is something of a running theme in this movie, which does have a bit of an anti-establishment vibe to it.) Naturally there are some ups and downs along the way and soon she is heading for London, this time accompanied by Jason, who has taken a break from his actual job as a lineman.

(This is a lineman as in someone who goes up a ladder fixing, I suppose, telephone wires. I mention this for the sake of clarity, having spent many years of my own life under the mistaken impression that Glen Campbell's classic song 'Wichita Lineman' was sung in-character by the third official at a soccer match. Apparently not.)

Well, in no time at all Caressa is gazing around her at the wonders of the London Games with the kind of dazed expression only to be seen on the face of someone who has just seen a mass celebration of the history of the NHS and the Queen pretending to jump out of a helicopter. You don't need me to tell you that she wins a medal at the Olympics, do you? You don't get a bio-pic written by the likes of Barry Jenkins just for making the quarter-finals, after all.

It has to be said that so far the film has basically been a pile of clichés from different types of rather familiar films – boxing movie, talented-person-fights-their-way-out-of-poverty movie, injustice-of-life-in-Black-America movie, and so on – not poorly assembled at all, I hasten to say, but even so. Nevertheless, the Olympic gold medal, which would be the natural end point for this kind of film in the usual way of things, only marks the conclusion of the second act, at which point the film becomes somewhat more interesting.

Shields goes home, believing that things are now going to start changing for her and her loved ones – she's won a gold medal for the success-fixated USA so the money is going to start flowing as if from a big golden hosepipe, right? Well, not quite. What follows is sobering and even a little subversive: it's genuinely startling for a character in what has up to this point been a fairly formulaic sports biopic to declare that, actually, to some extent it really is about the money, and they're not getting their fair share of it.

It's a brave play by the movie, which risks making Shields come across as mercenary and unsympathetic – but the point really is well made here. In this way at least The Fire Inside has some very sharp points to make about the commercialisation of sport and the knock-on effect this has on women athletes in particular. There are all kinds of double-standards and gender stereotypes here and the film really does drive home how grotesque and unfair it all is. At least we can console ourselves with the thought that, apparently, a new golden age is in progress in the United States of America, so soon the system will be overhauled so that women athletes aren't just judged on their appearance or any other arbitrary standard of femininity. And what a relief that is.

Or possibly not, as The Fire Inside got its US release over the Christmas period where it promptly bombed at the box office. This seems a bit unwarranted as this is a competently-assembled movie with a couple of very decent performances from Destiny and Henry holding it together. Perhaps Caressa Shields is not really famous enough for her story to draw a crowd. Or perhaps the failure of the film is more evidence that audiences like their female athletes struck from a certain non-threatening mould and that the points it is making are still very pertinent ones. If so, then this is clearly another thing in urgent need of being Made Great Again, although to be honest even Made Tolerable Again would be a decent start. In any case, this is a watchable sports movie made memorable by its political subtext.

Awix

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