“What you think about girls’ boxing?” The man asking that is Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry), the coach of a boys’ boxing club in Flint, Michigan. It’s 2012, and five years before he’d allowed one girl to join his club (even though it was against protocol): a coiled 11-year-old scowler named Claressa Shields, played by Jazmin Headley and then, as she grows up, by Ryan Destiny.
Claressa, the heroine of “The Fire Inside,” has the dogged determination to pummel her way into the ring. It’s not as if she talks her way in — Claressa, as we learn, doesn’t say much. She speaks with her fists. And one of
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