I, TONYA (15)

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya As a girl, Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) learns to ice-skate at the behest of her domineering mother LaVona (Allison Janney), who secures Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) as a coach.

LaVona is far from impressed with Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) as a potential son-in-law but she is powerless to stop her daughter from falling under Jeff ’s spell.

Tonya trains hard and becomes the first American athlete to land

a triple axel jump in competition but the judges refuse to give her the high marks she thinks she deserves. Rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver) is lavished with praise and overshadows Tonya’s achievements.

Tonya’s bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) and Jeff hatch a loopy plan to hire two low-level criminals to attack Kerrigan after one of her practice sessions.

Based on “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with US figure skating champion Harding and

ex-husband Gillooly, I, Tonya is a blackly humorous biopic, which illuminates a grubby episode in sporting history. .

Screenwriter Steven Rogers invites the deeply flawed protagonists to talk directly to camera, offering contradictory and overlapping testimonies.

Robbie inhabits the title role with fearlessness and ferocity, tossing out expletives as if her life depended upon it. Oscarwinner Janney is monstrous as a chain-smoking matriarch, who preaches cruelty as kindness to jaw-dropping excess.