I, Tonya

Aussie director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) never asks for the audience to suspend disbelief while watching I, Tonya. In fact, the film opens with Margot Robbie as an older, spent Tonya Harding announcing that the film is a mix of truth and lies. Each member of the stellar ensemble -- Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser -- goes for broke in this retelling of the low-class horrors that created a world-class figure skater and then all but ruined her life. Janney, an effing scream as Tonya's witch of a mother, cusses and smacks her way through the picture, dragging on cigarillos while abusing her daughter and destroying all goodness in her path. When Tonya finally moves out and in with boyfriend Jeff Gillooly, she simply exchanges one variety of sociopath for another. It's Gillooly and his portly numbskull of a friend Shawn who came up with the idea of sabotaging "America's Darling" skater Nancy Kerrigan. How and when sabotage, which started as sending some intimidating letters to Kerrigan, became bashing her on the knee is disputed but that's the wonder of this madhouse of a picture. It's all a Crockpot of truths, half-truths, mis-rememberings and full-blown lies that the audience is welcome to believe or not. Robbie and Stan are truly inspired as the warring couple, who in the end stopped just short of killing each other.