Moviegoers who haven’t thought about Tonya Harding in years may find themselves wondering if they may have judged her too harshly.

Margo Robbie as Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya.”

By Peg Aloi

Disclaimer: I freaking love figure skating. I’m that person who doesn’t give a crap about the Olympics unless someone is skimming the ice in metal tipped booties wearing a sparkly outfit. In 1994, the year Tonya Harding was implicated in a physical assault on Nancy Kerrigan, I was blissfully unaware of either of them. I was barely out of graduate school and didn’t own a television, but it was still hard to avoid the news.

I lived in Boston at the time, and of course Kerrigan was canonized for being a victim. I recall seeing Tonya Harding questioned by reporters: I thought she sounded bland and robotic, repeating over and over again she just wanted to get back to focusing on skating so she could achieve her “dream.” I was vaguely aware Harding had set some sort of record and was heading to the Olympics. Harding was known to be a working class kid, not commonly seen in the world of ice skating. Nancy’s path had been more conventional.

I didn’t know what to think about the assault allegations at the time. But watching Kerrigan skate on TV one night with a friend, we both agreed she was a total princess, with her saccharine facial expressions and overly dramatic gestures. Her petulant air when she received the Silver Medal at the Olympics came off as terribly entitled and ungracious. Of course, once could argue that Harding was similarly unprofessional: she stalked right up to the judges on numerous occasions to complain about her scores and lifted her skate up so it was inches from their faces, showing them that it had been tied too loosely and caused her to fall.  But it wasn’t hard to see that judges rewarded “presentation” almost as highly as technical skill, and that Harding’s failure to fit the cookie cutter image worked against her. Still, it was difficult to pity someone who seemed to behave so badly, at least when the cameras were rolling.

There appears to have been much more to the story than I ever picked up on. I, Tonya is a high-energy hybrid of fake documentary, docudrama, and reality TV. It makes use of real life interviews and news stories; thanks to the footage and its letter-perfect portrait of 1990s culture, the film made me re-live those times in vivid detail. Essentially, I, Tonya is an attempt at an intimate biographical portrait of Harding’s life in professional figure skating, beginning when she was a little girl. Australian director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) deftly creates a story full of humor, suspense, and revelatory events, the latter involving such high stakes some viewers may find themselves gasping, cheering, and applauding as if they’re, well, attending a sporting event. Perhaps, as an Aussie, Gillespie knows all too well how tabloid-style remembrances tend to color our understanding of the truths of tarnished celebrities’ lives.

We begin with Tonya as an adult (Margot Robbie’s performance is full of fire and nuance, sympathetic but  damning as well), speaking to the camera and assuring us that we’re about to get the real story. Harding’s mother LaVona (Allison Janney is steely and often hilariously deadpan in this role) is a loud, crass, profane, mean-spirited mom who constantly complains about how much she is giving up so her daughter can have figure skating lessons. McKenna Grace is terrific as the young Tonya, a pint-sized version of her foul-mouthed, pushy mother. Their lack of funds make it hard for Tonya to wear the expensive outfits her peers prance around in, so she doesn’t quite fit in with the figure skating culture. At one point, Tonya feels pressured to get a fur coat to wear off the ice to come up with a fur coat to wear off the ice; it prompts some rabbit hunting and a not-half-bad stitch job to give the girl a rabbit fur coat.

Flashing forward, teenage Tonya is still wearing a rabbit fur coat, works part time in a shitty job, and is struggling to continue her rise in the figure skating world. Her coach (a nearly unrecognizable Julianne Nicholson, in a platinum wig) appears throughout the film, gently reminding us that Tonya’s strenuous training was done with little fanfare. Still, the coach is frustrated with Tonya’s insistence on being Tonya, with her tacky outfits, unsubtle make up, and working class music choices (like ZZ Top). But Harding’s refusal to embody a classy ice princess in gold lame doesn’t matter when she lands that triple axel and sets a world record. Her ascent to the Olympics, as well as her winning numerous figure skating championships, seems to suggest that her talent, drive, and hard work is the result of her transcending her upbringing.

The thing is, Tonya Harding really was an incredible skater. As entertaining as the on-camera testimonials are from the main characters, much of this film’s thrill-ride energy comes from the stunning sequences showing skating performances, superbly edited to make Robbie look as if she’s every inch a professional (despite her having a more lithe frame than the mesomorphic Harding). The moments before high-stakes competitions where Harding struggled to maintain a brave façade in the midst of her chaotic personal life make it clear this young woman was almost as skilled at acting as she was at skating: an intriguing take on the meta-cinematic structure of this fake documentary conceit. Tonya’s power was in her authenticity.

But then there’s her husband. Jeff Gillooly (an impressive turn by Sebastian Stan) was a charmer and a bully. I recall seeing a made-for-TV movie about Harding back in the day and it portrayed their relationship as passionate and stormy. Despite his frequent physical abuse (which Gillooly flatly denies in his on-camera testimonials), Harding can’t seem to leave him. Gillooly was considered by many to be the mastermind behind the Kerrigan assault, but the film suggests that he was egged on by his friend Shawn Eckhardt (an absolutely wonderful scenery-chewing performance by Paul Walter Hauser), who has a delusional sense of himself as Harding’s bodyguard and some sort of secret agent. Then there’s Bobby Cannavale as a TV producer for tabloid fodder program Hard Copy, who grins like a leopard eyeing a gazelle, commenting on Tonya’s story as if it’s pure entertainment (which for much of the world, it was).

But did Harding want to be a monster, a joke, a bull in the china shop? No, she wanted to be a world-class ice skater. Entering that world as a poor working class kid who couldn’t afford ballet lessons or custom-made leotards meant she was in for a fight. Never mind that her mother in later life seems to have been as eager to cheer on Tonya’s downfall as she was to encourage her meteoric rise; or that her husband was a narcissistic monster who beat her up and ended up sabotaging her career. The one good choice Harding made was to keep making it all about the skating, and when that was no longer possible for her, she became a boxer. A sad punchline, or a badass expression of defiance? Moviegoers who haven’t thought about Harding in years may find themselves wondering if they, too, may have judged her too harshly; I certainly came away from this film with a more understanding view of this figure skating pariah. So I, Tonya is not merely a skewed biopic meant to engender classist sneering; that would suggest most of us could manage icy detachment in the face of pain and suffering. Let’s hope we’re more warm-blooded than that.

Peg Aloi is a former film critic for The Boston Phoenix. She taught film and TV studies for ten years at Emerson College, and currently teaches at SUNY New Paltz. Her reviews also appear regularly online for The Orlando Weekly, Cinemazine, and Diabolique. Her long-running media blog “The Witching Hour” can be found themediawitch.com.