Ride Like A Girl

(PG) ★★★

Director: Rachel Griffiths.

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Sam Neill, Sullivan Stapleton, Genevieve Morris, Brooke Satchwell, Stevie Payne, Magda Szubanski, Mick Molloy.

The horse was surprisingly adept at surfing.

Read my review for ABC News here.

Female sports biopics are, sadly, few and far between - last year's I, Tonya (which wasn't exactly celebratory of its heroine) and the year before's Battle Of The Sexes are the only ones that immediately come to mind (tell me all the ones I'm forgetting in the comments, please).

So Ride Like A Girl, the story of history-making jockey Michelle Payne, is a breath of fresh air. Not only is it a positive sportswoman biopic, but it's also Australian. And given how much we Aussies love sport, we should really be seeing a lot more of this kind of film.

I don't want to bang on too much more about the film here - you can click here for my full review on my employer's national news website. This is only being written on the off chance people regularly come to this site, or in case someone ended up here by accident due to the vagaries of the internet. And to say things I've thought of since writing my review for the ABC two days ago.

For those of you who don't want to click through to the ABC News website. Ride Like A Girl is the very definition of "good, not great". If it was a horse, it would be the kind that wins a few group two races, but never flourishes in group one.

The true story at the heart of it is exceptional, but little about the craft of the film itself is. The direction from first-time director Rachel Griffiths (best known as an actor in the likes of Muriel's Wedding and Six Feet Under) is solid and competent, and the script tells its story in a straight-forward, no-frills manner. The cast does a good job, with Stapleton the stand-out as now-disgraced trainer Darren Weir, Palmer showing real grit in the lead role, and Neill proving yet again to be incapable of delivering a bad performance, but no one is in career-best form.

These are good things though - if you want to see another exceptional true story with a horse-racing theme told poorly, check out The Cup. It takes its amazing real life yarn and pisses it away with a shitty script, terrible pacing, and dire performances. If nothing else, Ride Like A Girl is better than The Cup.

Perhaps more important than the three-star quality of the film though is what it says, both explicitly and implicitly. Much of the run-time is dedicated to Payne bashing against the glass ceiling of the male-dominated racing industry, and busting her gut to prove her worth to a bunch of ignorant men. At the same time, purely by existing, this female-led sports film highlights how few female-led sports films there are, and how worthy their stories are.

While the film is "good, not great", it is still heartwarming and tells a cracking underdog yarn. It has broad appeal, and hopefully a lot of people go and see it, if only to show that there is an audience for these kinds of films.