Last year, I was working security with the local Sunrise Movement hub for the arrival Greta Thunberg’s boat in New York City. Seeing her dock on dry land after two weeks of nautical travel was a genuinely celebratory event, especially since it took longer than expected that day due to uneven wind patterns. Yet Thunberg’s voyage also conveyed an uncomfortable truth: that a 16-year-old girl had to take it upon herself to raise awareness about climate change when so many adults with political power were ignoring the realities of its inevitable danger.

I Am Greta, as the title suggests, covers the Swedish climate activist’s two-year rise to global stardom, though its wider narrative doesn’t tell us more than what we already know. This isn’t necessarily intentional, as director Nathan Grossman has been documenting Thunberg since her original school strike outside Sweden’s parliament building at age 15. At the time, no one could have foreseen the subsequent media attention that would follow.

With her comprehensive knowledge of the climate crisis and its long-term repercussions, Thunberg quickly became a national celebrity and fixture of intense media attention, meeting figures like Emanuel Macron and Arnold Schwarzenegger while inspiring similar youth protests across the world. This also turned her into the grotesque target of every right-wing political leader and pundit who felt emasculated by the idea of a teenage girl telling them to listen to science.

Her passion stems from how, as someone diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, her mind is literally hardwired to be incapable of ignoring climate change’s dangers. Though Asperger’s affects social interaction—she prefers routine and converses more with her parents and dog than other people—it also makes one laser-focused on certain issues to an obsessive-compulsive degree. Unable to move past climate change after watching a video about the topic in class, her hypersensitivity manifests itself as a “superpower” that cuts through political soundbites and addresses the crisis’s cataclysmic effects in direct, clear-cut terms. Her simply central message: curb the problem now before we reach a point of no return.

When I Am Greta analyzes the obvious mental stress of a young girl shouldering this burden, it feels insightful. These quieter moments emphasize her resilience and uncertainty against world leaders even as they override her ability to simply be a normal teenager. At various points, Thunberg has to be reminded by her dad to eat between protests, and one somber moment sees her becoming overly fixated and overwhelmed by the proper French grammar in a letter, all of which are more than just a teen throwing a fit. She legitimately wants people to panic “like their house is on fire” and listen, if not to her then to scientists.

If there’s an issue with the film, it’s that Grossman ironically leaves out much discussion about scientific details and his subject’s personal life. Her father only appears in a few scenes, and her mother is barely in any, with the most we see of Thunberg’s homelife involving some horseback riding and laughing at the toxic criticism she receives on social media. That’s the paradox of Thunberg’s fame, which has attracted both right-wing ire and mainstream political sympathy from people perhaps more enamored with her stardom than her actual message. It would have been illuminating to have more footage documenting the climate crisis’s escalation or even conversations between Thunberg and scientific experts, if only to reinforce the very thing she keeps warning us about.

It’s still a film worth watching, if simply to understand why Greta Thunberg demands such urgent action on the matter. A heartbreaking phone call during her boat trip—framed as the film’s narrative climax—sees her lament this campaign as “such a responsibility” because she sees herself as the only one sounding any major alarm. Much like the recent Parkland student documentary Us Kids, I Am Greta’s teenage subject wants a problem to be solved by a world that can’t help but play politics, when she wouldn’t have to become involved if they actually did something.