REVIEW: I, Tonya is a trashy triumph for a brilliant, Oscars-bound Margot Robbie

REVIEW: In I, Tonya, the truth is not permitted to get in the way of a good story. Margot Robbie takes her talents to a whole new level as disgraced ice skater Tonya Harding.

I, TONYA (MA15+)

Rating: four stars (4 out of 5)

Director: Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl)

Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Alison Janney, Paul Walter Hauser, Bobby Cannavale.

If seeing is disbelieving, then they only have lies for you

The truth is not permitted to get in the way of a good story in I, Tonya.

To be fair, the filmmakers had no say in the matter. There are so many different versions of what really went down during the flamboyantly bizarre cavalcade of events chronicled here, that you just have to let the lies have their way.

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding takes time out for a fag ... all Olympic athletes do (cough!) in I, Tonya

Though you are sure to be deceived by I, Tonya, you are also certain to be entertained. Perhaps even enlightened.

First, let’s backtrack to a place where the facts remain irrefutable.

On January 6th, 1994, someone walked up to leading American figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and struck her just above the knee with a metal baton.

The attack was later found to be perpetrated by a man hired by the husband of Kerrigan’s chief rival on the US Olympic squad, Tonya Harding.

After that, the minutiae of the case remains murky, almost in spite of the FBI investigation that followed.

The media closes in on the controversial Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

Therefore I, Tonya screenwriter Steven Rogers and director Craig Gillespie quite wisely ignore the impossible task of isolating the most authentic version of the story.

There never will be one. Remarkably, instead of hampering the movie’s chances of charming and challenging an audience, it turbo-charges them.

The big, fat lies just keep on coming, and never outstay their welcome.

Which is perfectly acceptable, as not one of those implicated in this trashy debacle - the mercurial Miss Harding (played with a magnetic energy as damaged as it is damaging by Margot Robbie), her obsessive spouse Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and their idiotic chief bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser) - can agree on any single sliver of truth anyway.

Yet another frazzled moment for Tonya Harding and her no-good husband in I, Tonya.

With so many unreliable narrators in play, the only figure capable of administering a dose of reality here is Tonya Harding’s leather-lunged, acid-tongued mother, LaVona (an incredible display from Alison Janney, a sure thing for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar here).

In fact, LaVona may also have drawn the map that saw her daughter take every wrong turn on her path through life. The physical and psychological abuse dispensed by this woman all but sent Tonya directly in the arms of an equally abusive husband in the violently needy Gillooly.

Though I, Tonya will be processed by many as a comedy - and a relentlessly caustic one at that - it does build a genuine dramatic heat that impresses as much as it informs.

For all the tabloid-baiting, trailer-trashing high-jinks recklessly commemorated here, there is also a subtle sense of sorrow conveyed about the wasted lives these events chewed up and spat out.

Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly and Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.