Tonya’s attitude is more important, though. She belligerently challenges judges about a score she thinks is too low. When they sneer at her inelegant, home-made outfit, she yells, “If you can come up with $5,000 for a costume then I won’t have to make one!”

Gillespie (doing his best work since he directed Lars and the Real Girl) smoothly moves into comic territory with the knee-bashing incident. Jeff concocts a plan which Shawn orchestrates as only an idiot could, hiring men so inept they start by going to the wrong city.

The film supports the idea that Shawn was the rogue culprit, that Jeff and Tonya only meant to unnerve Kerrigan with death threats. Who knew what, and when, remains murky in real life. But among the plan’s failures: Kerrigan won a silver medal at the ’94 Olympics, Harding finished eighth and in the aftermath of the attack ultimately was barred from professional skating.

Robbie makes Tonya so sympathetic that it’s easy to gloss over the film’s major flaws. It ignores a basic question: why wouldn’t someone as ambitious as Tonya play along with the skating game, tame her hair, tone down her angry outbursts and not perform to heavy metal as her coach urged her to do? The idea that everyone has his or her version of the truth, which Tonya too-explicitly states, is both conventional and a convenient excuse for the film to not ask tougher questions.

Near the movie’s end, Tonya has become a joke to the public. Looking into the camera, she says, “It was like being abused all over again, only this time by you. All of you. You’re all my attackers too.” The lines are meant to evoke a visceral reckoning from us as viewers, and to stand as another example of Tonya’s “not my fault” posture. It works better as the second of those. The film gives too little weight to its heroine’s complicity.

We see her immediate post-skating life, a brief time as a boxer. She does it for the money, she says, but it’s also a way of holding onto fame. The scenes are undeniably sad but actually, yes, her fault. No one coerced her into boxing, limited though her options were.

The final sequence juxtaposes her dazzling moments on ice with images of her in the boxing ring, bloodied on the mat. She’s taking punches, as she had her whole life, this time in a futile attempt to reclaim some tarnished glory. I, Tonya finally gives her that.

★★★★☆

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