In Stockholm on Friday morning, for example, she was out there striking before school, wearing a facemask and socially distanced from others. Thunberg returned to school last month after taking a year off for her activism.

Grossman had remarkably close access to Thunberg and her family as she was becoming an international media phenomenon, and the end result is a film that provides a much fuller, emotional portrait of an ordinary yet at the same time extraordinary teen.

Filming behind the scenes during the Atlantic crossing and long train trips to European capitals, Grossman shows a Thunberg who cries, struggles translating a phrase into French and gets frustrated with her father, but who then holds her own in the halls of power.

The film debunks some of the criticisms of Thunberg, showing her writing her own speeches and making clear she was the driving force in the campaign, not her parents or other environmental interests. At the same time though, it makes viscerally real the pressures that were allowed to accumulate on her as the movement grew.

Thunberg said she appreciated that Grossman didn’t further what she said was the stereotype of her as “the angry, naive child who sits in the United Nations General Assembly screaming at world leaders.”

“That’s not the person I am,” Thunberg said. “He definitely made me seem more like a shy, nerdy person, which is the person that I am.”