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Mexican filmmaker Jonás Cuarón, now on his fourth feature, has settled into an ecstatic style that feels naturally torn from his father’s cloth, but with a signature stamp of his own on border-crossing stories.
His latest exuberant work, “Campeón Gabacho,” follows Liborio (Juan Daniel García Treviño), a charismatic Mexican migrant who settles in a Latino barrio of New York City to chase your typical American dreams. Dreams that, of course, get clouded by things like arson, police brutality, and exploitation, but they’re not totally thwarted, as Liborio winds up a local amateur boxing champion (hence the title, a slang term that basically means “gringo champion”).
Despite telling the camera in the opening scene, “I was born dead, nothing scares me,” he’s a lot sweeter on the inside than his machismoed-up front inevitably has to purport to be.
Jonás Cuarón co-wrote the film with Aura Xilonen, who wrote the original source novel, and the filmmaker’s boldest (and best) choice was to recreate a version of Jackson Heights on a soundstage in Mexico City. The neighborhood streets where Liborio lives, when not working under-the-table for a cranky local bookstore owner played by Eddie Marsan, teem with a bustle and vividly screen-popping varnish that looks more like it’s out of the movies rather than out of real life, cartoon-like even.
And all the better for it, as Cuarón and cinematographer Pepe Ávila del Pino have crafted a busily colorful, visually engaging world but bathed in the kind of creamy, fading light you see in an Alfonso Cuarón movie. Vérité-realistic portrait of hardscrabble immigrant life this film is not. The realism, though, comes in the particularity of the Spanish dialogue, the cultural exchanges, and colloquial understandings that run through this community — and from Mexico to the United States.
“Campeón Gabacho” doesn’t pull punches on the grimness of Liborio’s life, especially after the bookstore is burned down by gangsters who want his head, and he’s forced into living back on the streets, in gutters where cops beat him with their billy clubs when he can’t speak their language. He’s taken in by Aireen (Leslie Grace, last seen in Washington Heights for Jon M. Chu’s “In the Heights” but here well-suited to Cuarón’s fictional Queens), a kind-faced young woman who lives with and cares for her grandfather (Cheech Marin!), who is unfortunately dying slowly in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment.
Liborio falls fast, and Cuarón’s gilds grace notes to a harsh world with their fast-flowing romance; though I think we can do better in terms of subtle metaphors than an “Across the Universe”-lite fantasy sequence in which they pirouette into the clouds, soaring over the stratosphere, nuance at a remove isn’t precisely what Cuarón is after. He’s instead after a big crowd-pleasing movie that plays all the way to the back of the room for audiences, hence making SXSW the perfect place for the world premiere. A more inspired visual finds Liborio in an out-of-body experience as the cops pummel him, where García Treviño is seemingly vacuumed out the back of the drain pipe, pulled into the safety of a psychic void.
Cuarón and Xilonen’s screenplay doesn’t exactly penetrate Liborio’s interiority behind his street smarts — smarts that get their flex when a group of heavies hires him to basically be paid to be beaten in their amateur boxing matches, only for Liborio to turn out to be quite adept at swinging punches not pulled. Liborio’s stock rises when a cyberpunk-styled influencer named Doble-Ú (Rosario Dawson, a broad performance in a schematically drawn role) takes an interest in him, as do her four million followers.
Boxing scenes in movies, other than in a handful of classics, tend to start to look all the same, a mishmash of beads of sweat and blood and jowels distended, all fists flying and battering as two men catapult and careen across the ring. These don’t especially stand out in “Campeón Gabacho” despite García Treviño’s athletic performance (he comes to the film with a dancing background), but moments out of the ring stand out: Like Liborio’s mentee-mentor relationship with the generous Abacuc (Panamanian singer Rubén Blades), who runs an orphanage and encourages Liborio’s talent, which the amateur underdog mostly shrugs off.
Cuarón’s perspective on the material is most potent when it comes from his own soul, telling a Latino immigrant story — especially with such an ambitiously creative rendering of Queens — rather than from the more broadly played beats of the underdog movie genre. Not all of it works, and late stretches skew toward the saccharine, but Cuarón’s vision is nonetheless singular, grounded by a tour-de-force young performer.
Grade: B-
“Campeón Gabacho” premiered at SXSW 2026. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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