Nick Newell was born with a congenital amputation of the left arm — a fact the world couldn’t stop talking about and Newell himself seemed determined to make irrelevant. Notorious Nick, Aaron Leong’s 2021 biographical drama, follows that determination across the arc of a career that redefined what MMA’s gatekeepers thought they knew about competitive eligibility.

Cody Christian plays Newell with a physical fluency that keeps the film honest. There’s none of the self-dramatizing that often sinks sports biopics — no lingering close-ups on the absent arm, no scene in which someone tells Newell he can’t do this and we watch him silently absorb it as motivational fuel. The film takes it as given that he knows what he’s doing, and it lets the competitive logic carry the weight.

Director Aaron Leong keeps the camera functional rather than expressive — the octagon sequences read as sport rather than spectacle, which is exactly right for a story this grounded in documented reality. Elisabeth Röhm as Stacey Newell and Kevin Pollak as his coach Alex provide the emotional scaffolding without overloading it. Pollak especially resists the temptation to give us a Yoda figure; his Alex is practical, a little worn, operating in the same pragmatic register as Newell himself.

The screenplay, credited to Darrin Reed, Matthew Stuecken, and Josh Campbell, runs 88 minutes without overstaying its welcome. Its limitation is also its discipline: the film compresses a career that spans promotional circuits from small regional shows to a legitimate championship shot, and in doing so, it leaves the secondary architecture of Newell’s world underdrawn. The fight world around him exists as backdrop rather than as a place with its own physics and personalities.

What Notorious Nick gets right — and what ultimately lifts it above its genre neighbors — is its refusal to frame the story as exceptional. Newell didn’t fight despite his arm. He fought, trained, adapted, competed, and built a career. The film applies the same logic: it doesn’t treat the story as a miracle; it treats it as a record. The real Nick Newell was still competing at the time of the film’s 2021 release, which gives the final act a provisional quality — this is a chapter, not a conclusion.

A solid, unpretentious sports biopic that earns its emotional moments because it doesn’t reach for them prematurely. Notorious Nick won’t be the best film you see this year, but it will be one of the most honest.