type Movie genre Drama release date 12/08/17 performer Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan director Craig Gillespie mpaa R 
 
 We gave it an A- 
 
 In a sport of princesses, Tonya Harding was the perpetual toad: a trashy, too-brash outsider whose mind-blowing axels and sheer athleticism could never quite make up for the fact that she didn’t fit the demure, spangled mold of an ideal figure skater. Raised but hardly nurtured by a chain-smoking waitress (Allison Janney, a viper in Tootsie glasses and a mushroom-cap haircut), Tonya steadily clawed her way up the junior ranks, thanks mostly to pure willpower and the proxy parenting of a coach (Julianne Nicholson) who tried her best to steer her wild-card charge. What set Harding’s destiny, though, was the arrival of Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), the dim-bulb paramour and protector whose wonky scheme to take down his wife’s rival Nancy Kerrigan would go down in Olympics infamy. 
 
 Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) frames the movie as a faux documentary stuffed with flashbacks, talking heads, and fourth-wall-breaking asides. His form of satire can be a blunt instrument; it’s hard to tell sometimes whether he wants to be the Coen brothers, Christopher Guest, or just Spinal Tap on ice. But he’s also working from a script where the truth was irrefutably stranger than any fiction. And though the physical abuse Harding endures leaves an ugly bruise on its high-camp ’90s nostalgia, there’s something genuinely electric about the narrative’s headlong tumble into madness. The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love. A- ||||| 'I, Tonya,' You, Implicated 
 
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 Tonya Harding was never supposed to be a pro figure skater. Like so many young American dreamers before her, she had it all wrong for success: born into the wrong class, raised by the wrong role model, drawn to the wrong men. And she had the wrong kind of femininity for the sport she loved, too, because those judges didn't want to see a ZZ Top routine from someone who sewed her own costume, even if it did include a flawlessly executed triple axel. 
 
 So when Harding did find a bit of glory, there were corrective measures in place, and her self-made undoing — by playing some part in the "hit" on U.S. rival Nancy Kerrigan's leg, the scandal that would unravel her career and the entire 1990s along with it — was the fitting, flaming end to her membership in the elite club that never wanted her anyway. 
 
 That is the argument put forth by I, Tonya, the cheeky and skate-sharp new biopic from director Craig Gillespie coming only a few short years after the ESPN documentary. The title tips us off that Harding's story — drawn from interviews with all the key players — has been rehabilitated into the stuff of tabloid Greek tragedy. This is a bold film, especially in its leveraging of all that real-life contradiction to create something that shocks and delights us with its own stylistic wrongness. I, Tonya takes greater risks with the biopic genre than any other in recent memory, and it's remarkable how much of it lands upright. It's the triple axel of based-on-a-true-story movies. 
 
 As played magnificently by Margot Robbie, Tonya is a powerhouse athlete, a fragile abuse victim, an impoverished country girl and a snarky media critic. Robbie embodies all these roles with a childlike sincerity, a lost-soul cluelessness, as her Tonya never ceases to wonder why it can't just be about the skating. She and the film whip among these personas with wild abandon, mixing styles and tones in a chaotic fashion that borders on overkill. (Must we indulge "present-day" interviews, voice-over AND talking directly to the camera?) But it all builds to a satisfying and illuminating portrait of a poor American girl who maybe never stood a chance. 
 
 The film's account of Harding's upbringing is so heartbreaking that it would be unbearable if it weren't presented in such a bouncy, off-kilter way. As a child in Oregon, she was practically shoved onto the ice by her waitress mother LaVona (a superb Allison Janney), partially because her mom sees talent but mostly because she is grooming Tonya for a future as the butt of her endless verbal and physical abuse. LaVona will hold the cost of Tonya's skating lessons over her head for the rest of her life, long after she compelled her daughter to drop out of school so she can focus on the sport. 
 
 Most of the film is devoted to Tonya's marriage to, and subsequent divorce from, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Although the Jeff in the "present day" sequences is muted and introspective, offering deep insights into how his decisions would go on to shape the culture, in the rest of the film, he is an abusive leech, incapable of offering anything to Tonya except psychological obsession as she climbs the ranks of U.S. Figure Skating. Their tumultuous relationship is marked by the cycle of Jeff's abuse (he hits her at home and later threatens her at gunpoint) followed by his blubbering, shameless apologies and Tonya's continued gravitation to him even after leaving him and filing a restraining order. Even these scenes, which are brutal enough to watch without the pop songs that punctuate them like thunderclaps, don't come close to reaching the real-life Harding's accounts of what Gillooly did to her. But abuse is complex, particularly if you live a sheltered, scrutinized existence, and one of the big strengths of I, Tonya is how it refuses to make its hero into a sap or her abusers into mere monsters. If they were, we wouldn't feel as affected by a moving (if a bit showoffy) long take of a post-divorce Jeff in various mopey positions around the house, inhabiting Tonya's negative space. 
 
 The film abruptly shifts gears into full-blown farce as we approach what everyone on screen refers to as "the incident": the attack that created the inescapable digital-video image of the innocent, white-dressed Kerrigan clutching her knee and wailing, "Why? Why?" Gillespie and screenwriter Steven Rogers know an inept hit job when they see one, and they milk this conspiracy of dunces for all it's worth. It's all orchestrated by Jeff's buddy and self-proclaimed Tonya bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Hauser, champion goober), who mimes criminal-mastermind behavior from inside his mom's basement; his "guys" get hyped for their job by blasting "Gloria"; and when it's all over and Shawn has blown his own cover, he insists to a TV reporter that he has training in "counterespionage and counterterrorism," despite all evidence to the contrary. 
 
 I, Tonya gets mushy on the question of exactly how much knowledge Tonya had of the incident, which is consistent with the intrigue that has surrounded this sordid saga ever since. But it takes the extra step of insisting the real culprits are us, the basic-cable mouth-droolers who hoovered up her every mistake because we love to watch train wrecks on ice. In fact, Tonya shames us right to our faces, an accusation we might take more seriously if the movie didn't seem to be trying so hard to reconnect with whatever electric qualities first hooked America on her story. Still, for as jolting an experience as watching the film can be, it does help Tonya live her truth, while revealing, from within all its wrongs, the basic truth of figure skating: It has never just been about the skating. ||||| You probably haven’t thought about Tonya Harding much recently. Truly, why would you? The Olympic figure skater reached the height of her fame nearly a quarter century ago for something that didn’t even happen on the ice: the notorious attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, orchestrated by Harding’s then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, just before the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit. 
 
 Even though Harding wasn’t personally involved in the infamous, injurious leg-whacking, she may as well have been, her reputation and career were so irreparably damaged. She became a punchline, her name alone providing a bitter shorthand for scandal. 
 
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 All of which makes “I, Tonya” such a wonder. Not only will it make you think about Tonya Harding again, it will make you do so with unexpected sympathy. It will make you feel for her, deeply, for the abuse and pain she’s suffered for so much of her life. Director Craig Gillespie pulls off what would seem to be an impossible high-wire act: He’s made a movie that’s affectionately mocking—of this theatrical sport, of the idiots who surrounded Harding, of this hideous moment in fashion and pop culture—without actually mocking Harding herself. 
 
 Steven Rogers’ script shows great kindness and emotional charity for this wounded figure, even as it tells her story through a whirlwind of unreliable narrators. It’s “GoodFellas” on ice—darkly comic and often just plain dark, but always breathtakingly alive. Despite the colorful glitz and cheese of the figure-skating setting, “I, Tonya” has an unmistakably tumultuous air from the very start. And at the center of the storm is Margot Robbie in the performance of a lifetime as Harding. 
 
 Robbie has steadily shown keen insight in the roles she’s chosen, a hunger for the challenge of meaty material and a clear drive to prove she’s so much more than just a beautiful face. Whether it’s as the va-va-voomy siren of “The Wolf of Wall Street” (which put her on the map), the smooth scam artist of “Focus,” the bat-wielding bad-ass Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad” or the noble frontier woman of “Z for Zachariah,” Robbie has dazzled us with her versatility, even as she’s consistently held us with her charismatic screen presence. Here, she’s got the requisite swagger of an athlete at the top of her sport (and even learned to skate for the part), but it’s tinged with sadness as we the see the low sense of self-worth buried underneath—the result of years of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her cruel mother. 
 
 Allison Janney absolutely tears it up as the profane, chain-smoking LaVona Harding, constantly insulting Tonya and messing with her mind in the name of making her a champion. It’s a showy, scenery-chewing performance but it’s not one-note; Janney brings an undercurrent of sorrow to the part in revealing LaVona’s twisted methodology. 
 
 But Tonya was doomed never to receive an enthusiastic embrace from the figure skating elite because she and her mother didn’t fit their superficial, socioeconomic ideals. That’s an element of Harding’s story that “I, Tonya” depicts incisively; it’s one of the key components to her tragic downfall, but it also makes her story relatable beyond the insular world of figure skating. Growing up poor in Portland, Oregon, with her frizzy ponytail and poofy, homemade costumes, Harding struggled to look the part of the pristine ice queen—something Kerrigan achieved effortlessly. Even though Harding was an extraordinarily athletic female skater—one of a rare few to this day to land a triple axel cleanly in competition—U.S. judges often didn’t give her the scores she deserved because she didn’t adhere to the image they wanted to project. 
 
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 When Harding married the first man who was nice to her—at least, at first—she went from one abusive situation to another because it felt familiar, if nothing else. Sebastian Stan initially plays the part of Jeff Gillooly with a hint of benign goofiness. He’s a sleaze ball in a turtleneck and a porn mustache. But as his violent side emerges and his emotional hold on Tonya strengthens, he’s positively chilling—and your heart breaks for her all over again, because you know that no matter where she goes, she’s trapped. 
 
 Under those circumstances, it’s a miracle she could get out on the ice merely to practice, much less compete at the absolute highest echelons of the sport. And the more we learn about her life, the more it becomes sadly clear that the odds were always stacked against her. 
 
 In interviews both recreated and imagined, Gillespie depicts her rise and fall from a variety of competing perspectives and contradictory voices. (Editor Tatiana S. Riegel keeps the film moving at a propulsive pace.) We hear from Harding herself; an increasingly abrasive LaVona; Harding’s genteel coach, Diane (Julianne Nicholson); a squirmy Gillooly; and Gillooly’s delusional pal, Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), Harding’s self-appointed “bodyguard” and the mastermind of what everyone bitterly refers to as “The Incident.” 
 
 Taken together, they create a picture that isn’t exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. What “I, Tonya” does provide honestly, though, is a vivid slice of pop culture history—an irresistible, soapy mix of jealousy, competition and class warfare, fortified by powerful performances and unexpected emotional resonance. 
 
 Given the gripping, heightened reality of this stranger-than-fiction tale, it’s frustrating that Gillespie has chosen so many on-the-nose soundtrack selections to punctuate particular moments. "Devil Woman" by Cliff Richard starts up as LaVona barks orders on the ice at a young Tonya, played with convincing angst and heartache by Mckenna Grace. Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” plays during a beautifully fluid sequence in which Harding finally finds the guts to leave Gillooly and her volatile life with him behind. Great songs, all, but the classic rock needle drops can be distractingly obvious. 
 
 
 
 Still, that’s a minor deduction in an otherwise nearly flawless program. “I, Tonya” is one of the year’s best films. ||||| (CNN) "I, Tonya" announces up front that it's based on "irony free, wildly contradictory" interviews with the participants, yielding a darkly satiric comedy with the tenor of a Coen brothers movie. Elevated by Margot Robbie and Allison Janney's shimmering performances, this entertaining account of those strange events earns the sort of high marks for creative interpretation that its protagonist complained eluded her. 
 
 That protagonist, of course, is Tonya Harding, the figure skater etched into the public consciousness by her association with one of the strangest modern scandals -- namely, her husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) participating in a plot to kneecap her principal rival, Nancy Kerrigan, prior to the 1994 Olympics. 
 
 The movie, however -- directed by Craig Gillespie ("Lars and the Real Girl"), and drawn by screenwriter Steven Rogers in part from his interviews with Harding and Gillooly -- goes well beyond "The Incident," as its principals call it, to focus on Harding's abusive, hardscrabble upbringing, segueing from life with her abusive mother LaVona (Janney) to her abusive boyfriend-then-husband Gillooly. 
 
 Featuring the characters in direct-to-camera interviews, a strong undercurrent to the film is that Harding's downfall preceded several others of the tabloid-friendly 1990s, so much so that a "Hard Copy" reporter (played by Bobby Cannavale) is among the witnesses, wryly noting that the show was dismissed as trash by a media ecosystem that later mastered copying its sordid bag of tricks. 
 
 Janney pretty nearly steals the show as Tonya's foul-mouthed, chain-smoking mother, who constantly gripes about how she's squandering her limited resources on skating lessons and coaching for a girl, she's told, who "stands out because she looks like she chops wood every morning." 
 
 Read More ||||| UPDATE: Allison Janney proves to be a powerhouse in the upcoming satirical Tonya Harding biopic, I, Tonya, in a new trailer for the flick released Wednesday. The West Wing actress plays Harding (Margo Robbie)'s mother LaVona Golden, who uses tough love to push her daughter toward Olympic gold. 
 
 "You call that a clean skate, for Christ's sake?" she screams at a young Harding in the trailer. "Do not swear in front of the kids," a fellow parent admonishes her, to which Janney-as-LaVona responds, "I didn't swear, ya c--t." 
 
 And another insult: "You skated like a graceless bull dike. I'm embarrassed for you." 
 
 The trailer also reveals a break in the film's fourth wall, with Robbie-as-Tonya directly addressing viewers at one point in the two-and-a-half-minute clip, shotgun in hand. 
 
 ORIGINAL STORY: Margot Robbie oscillates between fact and fiction as notorious figure skater Tonya Harding in the new teaser for, I, Tonya. The biopic premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on December 8th, with a wide release scheduled for January 19th. 
 
 Related Toronto Film Festival 2017: 30 Movies We Can't Wait to See From Oscar potentials to Lady Gaga and Grace Jones docs and a secret Louis C.K. movie, our must-see picks for the fest 
 
 The short clip opens with a delightfully ruthless image: Robbie, as Harding, stubbing out a cigarette butt with her skate blade before hitting the ice. The teaser captures the aesthetic of a classic sports movie with dramatic music, gorgeous footage of Harding gliding over the ice while rapt fans watch. It all inevitably leads up to the infamous attack on Nancy Kerrigan and ensuing scandal that ended with Harding's lifetime ban from U.S. Figure Skating. 
 
 "The haters always say, 'Tonya, tell the truth,'" Harding says in a voice over. "There's no such thing as truth – I mean it's bullshit!" 
 
 In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Robbie spoke about preparing for I, Tonya and admitted that, prior to reading to the script, she didn't know who Harding was. "I think I was about four years old when the incident took place," she said. "I was in Australia and totally unaware of the whole incident and the crazy controversy." Robbie added: "To be honest, when I read the script, I didn’t know who Tonya Harding was, and I didn't realize it was a true story. I thought it was entirely fictionalized and our writer Steve [Rogers] was so creative to come up with the quirky characters and absurd incidents." 
 
 Craig Gillespie directed I, Tonya, which also stars Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Bobby Cannavale, Paul Walter Hauser, Julianne Nicholson and Mckenna Grace. ||||| Things got awkward between Tonya Harding and Piers Morgan. 
 
 On Tuesday, the former Olympic ice skater appeared on Good Morning Britain via satellite and was probed by the 52-year-old TV personality about the infamous 1994 attack on her rival, Nancy Kerrigan. Morgan was ruthless in pressing Harding about whether she knew that her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, and his co-conspirator, Shawn Eckhardt, had hired a hitman to club Kerrigan in the knee after the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Michigan. 
 
 Harding dodged the inquiries and insisted that she was only there to promote the positive message of her biopic, I, Tonya, which stars Margot Robbie. "I respect you for trying to ask these questions. I'm here to talk about the future and what it means," she said. "My movie is going to help so many people, [and let them know] that it is OK to ask for help. So, that's why I'm here." 
 
 Interrupting the former 47-year-old athlete, Morgan responded, "Maybe it suits you to play the victim, [but] the victim was Nancy Kerrigan." 
 
 Harding then tried to shut down the interview. "Thank you so much but I think I'm going to have to say have a good night," she told the morning show host. 
 
 "You're going?" Morgan asked. 
 
 "You weren't letting me finish," she replied. "I think many people are victims every day, people need to stand up for themselves, that abuse shouldn't be happening anymore." 
 
 Morgan chimed in, "Nancy Kerrigan was the victim, she was abused she was attacked." 
 
 "People don't understand what I was going through," Harding insisted. 
 
 Bringing up the attack once more, Morgan pressed, "You did know what was happening, what they were planning to do didn't you?" 
 
 "No I did not!" Harding exclaimed. 
 
 Morgan replied, "You didn't have any knowledge at all, it was a pure coincidence?" 
 
 "No I did not," Harding again responded before ending the interview. 
 
 "I’m afraid I don’t share Ms Harding’s view that she is the victim in this story," Morgan later tweeted. 
 
 Prior to her appearance on Good Morning Britain, Harding joined the I, Tonya cast at Sunday's Golden Globes and celebrated with Allison Janney after she won for her portrayal of LaVona Golden, Harding's mother. 
 
 "She was overwhelmed by the movie," Janney told ET's Kevin Frazier of Harding's reaction to the critically acclaimed film. "I think she's having a great moment. I think she loves it and I think she should because the movie tells a more nuanced side of her story." 
 
 Janney added, "It's much more complicated then what we first thought when this incident happened back in the '90s." 
 
 Check out more of our exclusive interview with the Golden Globe winner: 
 
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– You may think you know Tonya Harding, the US figure skater whose career was ruined when she was associated with an attack on her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, ahead of the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships. But Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya might convince you otherwise. Presented as a faux documentary, the film starring Margot Robbie has a 90% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what they're saying: "I, Tonya takes greater risks with the biopic genre than any other in recent memory, and it's remarkable how much of it lands upright. It's the triple axel of based-on-true-story movies," writes Andrew Lapin at NPR. Robbie "magnificently" embodies Harding with "a childlike sincerity, a lost-soul cluelessness," he writes. This, and the film's chaotic mix of personas and styles, "builds to a satisfying and illuminating portrait of a poor American girl who maybe never stood a chance." "There's something genuinely electric about the narrative's headlong tumble into madness," coming from "a script where the truth was irrefutably stranger than any fiction," writes Leah Greenblatt at Entertainment Weekly. She found the skating scenes "thrilling." But "Robbie is the real revelation," Greenblatt writes. "She's a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won't just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love." It's "a darkly satiric comedy with the tenor of a Coen brothers movie" and "earns the sort of high marks for creative interpretation that its protagonist complained eluded her," writes Brian Lowry at CNN. But he argues "the sleight of hand used to realize the skating sequences is visually distracting in places." He also says Robbie "struggles" at the start to truly come across as just 15. And though she recovers to deliver "a layered and unexpectedly sympathetic portrait," Allison Janney, playing Harding's mother, "pretty nearly steals the show." Christy Lemire is effusive: Robbie gives "the performance of a lifetime," conveying "the requisite swagger of an athlete at the top of her sport" as well as the "low sense of self-worth buried underneath." As for the film itself, it highlights Harding's outsider status from the outset, which "makes her story relatable beyond the insular world of figure skating," Lemire writes at RogerEbert.com. She concludes by calling I, Tonya a "nearly flawless program" and "one of the year's best films."