We Need More Great Female Sports Movies Like Fighting With My Family

Lately I’ve been deep in my feels about 2000s-era movies and TV. I blame Pen15, Hulu's new series about a pair of 13-year-old BFFs set in 2000. It made me realize that pop culture in the aughts gave me everything I needed to survive as a preteen: chat rooms, Beyoncé's solo career, and the foundation of all my feminist creeds.

As a tomboyish, hyperactive, athletic kid, I spent most of my time playing sports, watching movies about sports, and obsessing over the female stars of sports movies in a way that I would later come to understand as “being gay.” The timing was perfect—films about female athletes were booming in the 2000s. Movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Stick It, and She’s the Man were my lifeblood growing up because I identified so much with the young women in them. They were often facing discrimination just for being themselves, or were feeling othered. I loved that they were funny, sporty, a little gay (at least aesthetically), and uhh…hot. They were my Sporty Spice heroes. But somewhere along the way, we lost touch with our inner Mia Hamms. Movies like Blue Crush fell to the wayside, and we stopped sliming female athletes at the Kids Choice Awards. Society still stans top female athletes—hello, Serena Williams—but most of pop culture has dropped their narratives.

So when I saw Fighting With My Family, the new female wrestling comedy from Stephen Merchant that's in theaters now, I was galvanized. It’s eccentric, heartwarming, laugh-out-loud funny, and inspirational. It left me feeling utterly nostalgic for my adolescence. Laughing along was like muscle memory.

The best films in the subgenre of female sports movies either take a niche sport, like roller derby in Whip It, and invite us into an unexplored world, or shine a light on the hardships women face pursuing a career in a popular sport, like soccer in Bend It Like Beckham. Fighting With My Family accomplishes both. The movie, which was produced by former WWE star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson himself, drops us into the lion’s den of professional wrestling and promises to make us overnight fans.

It follows the real-life story of WWE wrestler Paige (whose real name is Saraya-Jade Bevis; Paige is her wrestling name) and her journey to becoming the youngest Diva champion in history. Played by Florence Pugh, Paige comes from an outrageous, wrestling-obsessed family of criminals. Her eldest brother (James Burrows) is in prison. Her father (Nick Frost) was jailed numerous times for, in his own words, “mainly violence.” Her mom, played by a lip-ringed, grungy Lena Headey, was suicidal when she met Paige’s father but reminisces about the moment like a romantic comedy meet-cute. Paige comes from a pack of oddballs, and her combative family are the only ones that make her feel at home.

Sound familiar? The heartbeat of the 2000s sports comedy was quirky environments. In Whip It, Ellen Page’s character, Bliss, falls head-over-heels in love with her roller derby team, a flock of pugnacious, tattooed fuck-ups who make her feel safe while participating in a violent and niche sport. The same goes for Stick It and Bend It Like Beckham, in which our protagonists find love and safety among their very own pack of weirdos. But the girls aren’t weirdos—they’re like-minded people who found shelter in each other from a world that made them feel othered.

In Fighting With My Family, Paige is lucky to find this security in her actual family. But once she goes big league, auditioning for the WWE and actually getting signed as a professional wrestler, she feels alienated by the bright lights, hot bodies, and the seemingly insurmountable amount of pressure that comes with competing professionally. She’s homesick.

Just like every great sports movie, Fighting With My Family takes us on an emotional roller coaster of getting knocked down, peeling yourself off the floor, and showing the world what you’re made of. It sounds cheesy…because it is! But there’s a difference between cheesy and tacky, and young girls need stories like this. They need women to identify with, a goal or career to aspire to. They also need the message that being different, or athletic, or "butch," as I was called as an insult—which, it's not—isn't just something to be tolerated. It's what makes you special. They need idols like Paige, a brawny, one-of-a kind, aspirational girl to stick on their wall and maybe lust over.

When I was young and felt cast out by other girls for being me, I needed to see Amanda Bynes as the lively Viola in She’s the Man, a soccer player who wouldn’t let roadblocks as meaningless as gender stop her from slaying on the field. I needed Keira Knightly and Parminder Nagra as Jess and Jules in Bend It Like Beckham, a borderline Sapphic, sporty duo who shattered the stigmas their conservative families believed about female athletes. I needed Missy Peregrym as Haley, the sharp-tongued, stand-alone tomboy gymnast in Stick It who was extremely “my way or the highway.”

Girls need to see people they identify with to find peace and acceptance in a world that makes them feel different or alone. And they deserve to scream-laugh while doing it. Florence Pugh should expect a future cult following of tween girls, the me's of tomorrow.