In January of 1994, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was infamously attacked and injured following a practice session at the U.S. Figure Skating Championship. It was later revealed that the attacker, a man named Shane Stant, was hired by co-conspirators of Kerrigan’s main team competitor, Tonya Harding, with the intent to break Kerrigan’s leg so that she would not be able to compete at that year’s Winter Olympics.

I was three years old in 1994. Growing up, I only knew about the incident in the vaguest of terms, my understanding being that at some point in the early 1990s, one female figure skater attacked another in an attempt to ruin her career. I didn’t know anything about these women, only that one of them was good, and one of them was bad. This is the version of Tonya Harding that history paints: she was a crude, aggressive, and ultimately vindictive woman who did unspeakable things to get ahead. She was the closest thing competitive figure skating had to a villain.

When I was home for the holidays last month, my mom and I saw a trailer for I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie’s biopic chronicling Tonya Harding’s life. “I don’t know why anyone would want to watch a movie about that,” my mom said. “I was watching when that happened. The sound of Nancy Kerrigan crying — it was so horrible. I can still hear it.”

Here’s the thing: I, Tonya isn’t about “that.” It’s not about the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, an event which solidified Harding’s reputation as the bad girl of figure skating and ultimately ended her career. No — this film is a biopic in the most traditional sense, no matter how untraditional its methods may be. This is a film about Tonya Harding.