Vague Visages’ Knock Out Blonde review contains minor spoilers. Tom DeNucci, Seth Koch and Rick Lazes’ 2024 documentary features Kellie Maloney, Chelsea Brickham and Amy Wade. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The appetite for celebrity documentaries easily outweighs the unique perspective a single interviewee can bring, which can be a curse for any filmmaker in the genre. If you’ve managed to secure time with a famous figure who has already spoken about their experiences in depth, what can you bring to their story that recontextualizes that journey in a new light? In response to this existential question, directors Seth Koch, Rick Lazes and Tom DeNucci fall at the first hurdle in Knock Out Blonde, with their own exclusive interview footage sharing equal screen time with archival material of the same subjects answering near-identical questions with near-identical responses. Even as someone who had no prior awareness of transgender boxing manager Kellie Maloney, the subject of Knock Out Blonde, everything I learned about the fascinating figure was constrained by extensive footage revealing that her story had been told with equal insight elsewhere many years earlier.

Koch and Lazes previously worked — as director and producer, respectively — on a 2020 documentary about Lennox Lewis (Lennox Lewis: The Untold Story), the three-time world heavyweight champion who Maloney managed to title-holding glory. That was the start of their relationship with their new primary subject, who was one of the several talking heads last time around, and her contributions in the Lewis documentary are presumably why her working relationship with the boxer isn’t considered a point of interest after the opening half hour. I can’t criticize this decision, though, considering that Knock Out Blonde is squarely aimed at boxing fans, and arrives at a time when transgender rights — both in and outside of the sporting world — are under more scrutiny than at any other time in recent memory. Even though Maloney had long left the ring behind before she became a promoter, her impact can still be felt within the sport itself through her stewardship of Lewis’ career, which several other budding promoters looked to for inspiration on building up their own clients in the public eye. As a public figure, she may have been open about her experiences before, but our current, harsher right-wing political climate makes hearing from someone who held such a pivotal position within a hyper-masculine sports industry even more urgent.

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The best moments of Knock Out Blonde emerge when Maloney confronts traumatic experiences in the closet, afraid to come out because of a pervasive, systemic underbelly of misogyny and transphobia. Her anecdotes about hearing other boxing promoters joking about beating up transgender sex workers help illustrate an environment that is presumably equally unenlightened — if perhaps less openly violent in its hostility — as it was when trans visibility was all but absent in the mainstream. This may only be a microcosm of a single industry, but that enough is illuminating as to why trans representation in sports is minuscule, no matter how much fear-mongering conservatives will try to convince you the opposite is true. And it’s something of a misstep on behalf of the filmmakers to not tie in Maloney’s own personal experiences with a look at the culture war against her gender identity, as they use a recognizable face to humanize — and diminish — an issue that has become contentious for political point-scoring alone. Her stories remain relevant in this regard, but there’s very little curiosity on the directors’ behalf about contextualizing them further; their focus seems to be on adding some personality to a straightforward career overview.

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Even more fascinatingly, prior to coming out, Maloney stood as both a mayoral and a parliamentary candidate for the far-right political party UKIP, formerly the home of Brexit Bogeyman Nigel Farage. Having made anti-LGBTQ comments during this aspiring politician period, at direct odds with her own closeted identity, this merging of a personal awakening that contrasted with Maloney’s political aspirations would have been fascinating to discuss, but it’s off the table in Knock Out Blonde. Hell, the fact that the subject continued to support UKIP past the 2015 election, only leaving when she finally accepted that the party members were institutionally anti-LGBTQ, seems to have been very purposefully omitted. It’s only indirectly evoked by archival footage of Maloney speaking at a UKIP rally, used in a montage while another talking head speaks over it, so the less inquisitive viewer would miss its significance entirely. 

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To explore this in detail would’ve offered more color to a portrait of a woman who is otherwise happy to still be deadnamed or misgendered, and is frequently the victim to both charges throughout Knock Out Blonde. This streak of anti-wokeism and Maloney’s lifelong embrace of radical right politics probably makes her a British Caitlyn Jenner, even if she has routinely shut that comparison down. Alas, Knock Out Blonde isn’t the kind of documentary that wants to paint a complicated picture of its subject — which, paradoxically, would be the kind of boundary-pushing representation we need now. Choppy editing also makes it seem like the character study is being polished in real time, with various audio excerpts from newly recorded interviews ending one sentence and starting another abruptly.

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Without that additional context, Knock Out Blonde feels like a retread of the various TV documentaries about Maloney and post-coming out interviews excerpted throughout the film. Neither the subject or her family have shied away from publicly discussing her transition, and their involvement in the documentary is frequently supplemented by archival interviews where they echo the exact same stories. A more complicated portrayal, or a perspective with a renewed relevancy, isn’t to be found in Knock Out Blonde — it’s a polished reimagining of a more intriguingly unconventional trans public figure, which is a gross disservice to her cultural significance.

Knock Out Blonde released digitally on May 20, 2025.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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