Queen of the Ring brings a winning combination of biopic, sports drama, and period piece with such precision and warmth, you feel you could step into Millie Burke’s (Emily Bett Rickards) wrestling ring, take the blows, and be happy to experience history as it was lived. It’s early 20th century, and Millie Burke, waitress, longs to entertain by wrestling men and women.
As the record has it, she becomes women’s world wrestling champion three times while suffering the slings of ambition, from making a fortune, losing it, and wrestling personal relations with the same mixed results. Rickards invests herself physically and mentally in Burke’s checkered career, with a fierce ambition and beauty that seems to set the standard for women’s liberation.
Her tumultuous relationship with her manager and then husband, Billy Wolf (Josh Lucas), parallels the give and take of the business that grows in front of us from mid-west home style to east-coast complicated, from scripted matches to shoot events with no script. Millie’s dogged ambition, which laudably always includes her son, Joe (Gavin Casalegno), is not only remarkably intrepid, but it is also inspirational, rooted as it is in historical fact.
Millie Burke, first million-dollar female athlete in history, is initially seen as a Kansas diner waitress always under the protection of her mother (Cara Buono) but longing to leave and become an entertainer. Given that she can’t sing or dance, her muscles show her the way to liberation—wrestling, even if women’s wrestling is outlawed in many states.
Despite the sometimes-incoherent, episodic telling, Millie’s arc is much like fictional sports stories as she loses everything she’s built to Billy but wins back heroically. The Queen of the Ring is a rousing biopic, mostly true, yet faithful to the chronicle of women on the ascendant in the last century. And then there’s Rickards’ breakout performance . . . .
Queen of the Ring
Director: Ash Avildsen
Screenplay: Avildsen, Alston Ramsey from Jeff Leen book
Cast: Emily Bett Rickards (We Need to Talk), Josh Lucas (Ford v Ferrari)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2h 20m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com