Sebastian Stan, Margot Robbie,, and Julianne Nicholson in I, Tonya (NEON)

 Too meta for its own good but bracingly vile and crackling with angry energy, I, Tonya is having quite the movie moment. How can we explain the acclaim for a twisted biopic of the notorious Tonya Harding, the underdog wannabe ice skating champion whose ex-husband instigated the plot to the kneecapping of Harding’s rival Nancy Kerrigan, America’s sweetheart, on the eve of the 1994 Winter Olympics?

I, Tonya has excellent casting to recommend it, from Margot Robbie as tough cookie Harding to Allison Janney as her hateful mother to an understated Julianne Nicholson as Tonya’s straitlaced coach. Skating scenes spin and leap with triple-axel verve. But even more crucial to its success, I Tonya is deeply in synch with several pop culture veins throbbing in the public headspace right now.

1. I, Tonya deals in Deplorable Chic. Ever since the 2016 election, liberal America has fretted over the signs it missed from forgotten flyover country. With its gum-chewing, chain-smoking, hardscrabble heroine and her low-rent love interest, I, Tonya serves up a redneck’s-eye view of the United States that viewers currently seem to crave (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).
2. This film wants to have its cake and eat it, too. I, Tonya sets up its put-upon skater as a victim of snobbery and elitism, even having a judge wearily tells Tonya flat-out she’s not wholesome or ladylike enough for what America expects in a skating princess. But the movie takes plenty of its own shots at Tonya, playing up the braces on her teeth, her homemade rabbit-skin coats, and her hapless, lummox accomplices for not-quite-empathetic laughs. “I became a punch line,” she declares at one point to the camera. True, and with the movie’s help, she still is one—a plucky one, but a punch line nonetheless.
3. I, Tonya busts the Fourth Wall flat. Speaking of talking to the camera, I, Tonya takes addressing the audience to a whole new level, making Tonya and husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) blurt to the screen in the middle of brutal beatdowns. Perhaps a gesture re-imagined from reality TV or video games, it’s an edgy technique that adds a layer of brazenness to the film’s many episodes of violence. The endless abuse doled out to the skater brings a harsh timeliness to the film that will endure beyond today’s #MeToo moment.
4. I, Tonya plays to today’s post-truth spirit. The film cleverly combines a fictionalized story, re-creations of real interviews, and, at its end, footage of actual participants in the Harding-Kerrigan scandal. In this way I, Tonya ends up reflecting a world where Daily Mail–style tabloid coverage, accusations of fake news, and wall-to-wall unreliable narrators have shredded truth into chopped liver. Harding even says it herself: “There’s no such thing as the truth.” (There might be truth if someone were to actually tell it.) But the film plays coy about what Harding knew about the plans to attack Kerrigan and when she knew it, opting to keep her more or less innocent of a very dirty deed.

I, Tonya is crude, brawling fun, and also a cynical and blowhard piece of work—perfect for the times we live in.