The first time boxer Claressa Shields watched The Fire Inside, a cinematic rendering of her life story which releases in theaters on Dec. 25, she tried to remove herself from the equation. She pretended the story was about some other athlete from Flint, Mich. growing up in poverty and chasing an Olympic dream. Shields planned to watch the film with a neutral eye, and give it a grade, as she typically likes to do when viewing sports flicks.
This exercise lasted all of 10 minutes. “I definitely put myself into it,” says Shields. Who wouldn’t, when watching themselves depicted on the screen? The performance of Ryan Destiny, who portrayed Shields, stunned the two-time gold medalist: she was able to capture Shields’ mannerisms, both inside and outside the ring. Shields, in both The Fire Inside and in real life, overcame a difficult childhood—and doubts about the appropriateness of female fighters in the ring—to become America’s first female boxing gold medalist, at the debut of Olympic women’s boxing at the London 2012 Games. She’s also America’s first and only back-to-back Olympic boxing champion, as she won again four years later in Rio. And currently, Shields ranks as the top pound-for-pound professional boxer on the planet, according to ESPN.
“I was just like, ‘wow, look at where we started, and look at where we are now,’” Shields, 29, tells TIME. “This is how you turn your pain into power.”
The Fire Inside effectively packs two films into one. While many movies would have ended with Shields winning the gold medal in London, to neatly wrap the traditional rags-to-riches redemption story, The Fire Inside—which was written by Barry Jenkins, director and co-writer of the 2016 best-picture Oscar winner Moonlight—takes viewers to an often-unexplored place: the months following an Olympic triumph, which for far too many athletes outside high-visibility sports like gymnastics and swimming is filled with disappointment, and sometimes despair. The expected financial windfalls often never come. They question the point of their pursuits.
