Review: ‘I, Tonya.’ I, Punching Bag. I, Punch Line.

The subject of “I, Tonya” — a winking, eager-to-please, fictionalized gloss on the disgraced ice skater Tonya Harding — gets roughed up a lot. As a child, she is degraded and smacked around by her mother, who kicks little Tonya’s chair so violently the kid flies off it. When the teenage Tonya gets involved with the man she will marry, her life as a punching bag continues. Her husband smashes her head onto a glass surface so hard that shards scatter; he bloodies her nose a few times. He also points a gun at Tonya, threatening to kill her. Despite all the beatings and blood, “I, Tonya” insists it’s a comedy.

The real Tonya Harding went from fame to infamy in 1994, after she was implicated in an attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a rival. On Jan. 6, after practicing for the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, Ms. Kerrigan was attacked by a man who thwacked her leg with a collapsible police baton. (He seems to have been going for her knee.) A camera captured Ms. Kerrigan on the ground as she repeatedly wailed “Why?” Ms. Harding went on to win the championship; it was a short-lived victory. The F.B.I. was soon questioning her, her ex-husband and their dumb-and-dumber associates. By June, Ms. Harding had been barred from competing for her role in the attack.

Energetically directed by Craig Gillespie, “I, Tonya” charts the hard-won rise and calamitous fall of its title character (Margot Robbie). Taking the form of a mock, mocking documentary, one that disjointedly swings between heehaw comedy and wincing agony, the movie establishes its raised-eyebrow tone with a title card stating it’s “Based on irony-free, wildly contradictory and totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly,” her former husband. (The screenwriter, Steven Rogers, has said that he spoke with both.) From their separate corners, the middle-aged, long-divorced Tonya and Jeff (Sebastian Stan), provide linked, at times vividly contradictory accounts of what happened.

In one location, Jeff sits facing the camera in front of a large window framed by photo-covered walls. There’s a lot more visual coding going on with Tonya, who’s plunked down at a table in a modest kitchen wearing a pale jeans jacket and cowboy boots. Lank blond hair and bangs border her face; her neck has gone puffy. Looking into the camera, she occasionally draws on a cigarette and crosses her legs, one big, down-home, country-gal ankle resting on a knee. The real eye-catchers are the dirty dishes stacked in the sink behind her. They stay put and stay dirty, which seems curiously sloppy given that Tonya, a media veteran, is here to tell her truth. If you didn’t know she had a reputation as down-and-dirty, here’s a hint.

As Tonya and Jeff offer up alternating stories, her past, her abuse and her triumphs come into view. The only daughter of an unhappily married couple, the young Tonya is a daddy’s girl. Her father takes her hunting, teaching her how to shoot rabbit. Her awful mother, LaVona (Allison Janney, chilled and excellent), is the one who arranges for Tonya to take lessons with a skating coach (Julianne Nicholson). Tonya turns out to be a prodigy and is soon powering her way into the top echelon of the sport, despite the snobbery and visible discomfort of the judges who favor froufrou femininity over aggressive competition. They want gliding princesses, not grunting athletes like Tonya.

The story of Tonya Harding has been told before in mainstream journalism and in scholarly accounts, documentaries and a quickie made-for-TV movie that lathered the soap. Before and after the incident, as it’s often called, she was grist for thumb-sucking takes on women, femininity, sports and social class. Before the attack, writers liked to point out that Ms. Harding played pool and drove a truck. In a sympathetic 1992 profile, Sports Illustrated described her as a “hardscrabble, dispossessed kid” who had become “an interloper in the realm of pixies and queens who’s as at home doing a brake job as she is performing an arabesque.” She was Cinderella with edge and muscles.

In “I, Tonya,” she is also an unreliable narrator, just like Jeff. “There’s no such thing as truth,” Tonya announces. “Everyone has their own truth.” The film takes up this statement as its guiding narrative principle, toggling between the she-said and he-said as it hurdles toward its nadir. The older Tonya makes an assertion, and the older Jeff does likewise. The young Tonya — in flashback — says one thing, the young Jeff says something else, and every so often LaVona chimes in. Characters periodically break the fourth wall by looking into the camera and directly addressing the viewer, as if to assert ownership on the unwinding story. Listen to me, each seems to say in these moments.

Ms. Robbie takes on the role with vigor and strained toothy smiles, giving an outsize performance that suits the film’s broadness and showy surfaces. (She does much of her own skating, though the trickier moves were completed with stunt doubles and digital effects.) Despite the makeup and a few tragic haircuts, Ms. Robbie remains an unpersuasive fit for the tiny Ms. Harding, who could bench press more than her weight and whose sculptured muscles freaked some out. You could write a treatise on female bodies pegged to the contempt that journalists unloaded on her, especially after the attack, when they called her “white trash” and “old Thunder Thighs.” She was 23.

As “I, Tonya” skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny. She was poor, grew up in trailers, had a temper, liked loud colors, dropped out of school, traded in one abuser for another and maintained some stupid acquaintances — a clown posse the filmmakers lavish too much time on. She might have played a role in the attack on Ms. Kerrigan, but in many ways Ms. Harding had already been found guilty for just being who she was. The same feels true here.

“I, Tonya” asserts that the truth is elusive. Yet some facts are known. Ms. Harding — as was widely reported — took out restraining orders against Mr. Gillooly, telling the police that he had hit her and she was afraid of him. Back then, her abuse was often played down; here, it is countered by scenes in which the tough Tonya fights back, at times with a comedic spin, as if to suggest that she can give as good as she gets. That makes this film and the brutality more breezily watchable, I suppose. Still, it’s instructive that at one point Tonya lectures the audience on its complicity in how she was treated. It’s an impressively disingenuous wag of the finger from a film that has encouraged our laughter right from the start.