There’s a moment in All Eyez On Me, the new Benny Boom-directed Tupac biopic, where the rapper stands defiantly before the court at the sentencing for his 1993 sexual assault case and addresses the judge directly. “You’re not looking at me—the man, the person,” he says. The remark comes near the end of a speech about the judge’s (and to a certain degree, the court’s) inability to see him as anything other than a black, tattooed gangsta rapper with priors and a history of confrontational behavior, but it almost feels like he’s speaking to the audience. The film, which is almost completely without revelation, is a two-hour lesson in how we choose to remember Pac: in ways that are untrue to what made him such an engaging figure.

So much of the way we see Tupac now—as poet and preacher, as revolutionary or martyr, as larger-than-life gangsta rap icon spitting into the camera—seems to insulate the legacy from the man, trying to reconcile a complicated individual with his lasting impact. His is “a story of ambition, violence, redemption, and love,” Pac himself said in archival footage used for the 2003 documentary Tupac: Resurrection. “Measure a man by his actions fully, from the beginning to the end.” Yet so few posthumous portrayals meet with Tupac on these terms.

Images and soundbites of Pac—from Tupac: Resurrection to Holler If Ya Hear Me, the short-lived Broadway musical based on his lyrics, to his repurposed interview on To Pimp a Butterfly, and so on—are used to immortalize him in a specific ways: as Tupac the Revolutionary, or Tupac the Rap Icon, or Tupac the Poet. They’re never rendered in three dimensions, and they never really humanize him. He was all of those things at once, but most of all he was true to his emotions at any given time. This flattening of his being denies his memory the ability to breathe, where his physical being cannot.

In many accounts, Tupac was often described as a utilitarian. He would read those around him and be who he needed to be in any moment, undoubtedly a product of his method acting chops. But he was usually trying to balance being who people needed him to be—he was the breadwinner for his family before he turned 21, the torchbearer for his mother Afeni’s movement, and the face of Suge Knight’s Death Row—with being who he was, or at least who he wanted to be. Constantly at odds with what it meant to be so many things to so many different people, his last best trick was getting under everyone’s skin, where he felt safest.

“Tupac made people uncomfortable,” Danyel Smith wrote in the 1998 biography Tupac Shakur. “He was not trying to ‘rise above’ the way things are. He was not trying to ‘be better.’ No one ever said what would happen if folks got tired of aspiring to dignity. Tupac showed one way it already is. ‘I love it when they fear me,’ he said. But more truly, he loved not fearing them.” This is integral to understanding someone who dedicated his life to fighting his own fears and trying to purge others—particularly the black lower class—from fear. Every action, every triumph and misstep, was in service of becoming free from fear, and subsequently sincere. Our recollections of him carry pretenses, depicting his existence in fragments.

A biopic’s primary utility is myth-making: to dramatize the lesser encounters in a lifetime, or to show us how an idol is made. But when a life has been as pored over and dissected as Tupac’s has, all that’s really left is to share insights about the man, who he really was beneath fame’s veneer. All Eyez on Me does the opposite, following in the footsteps of previous Tupac media, this time turning him into a martyr. The film tries to smooth over an artist defined by his jagged edges. He’s given the benefit of the doubt in his controversial sexual assault case, essentially exonerated on screen for the sake of preserving his righteousness. The portrayal is tame and almost diplomatic in comparison to the real thing. The half-rendered depiction is only exacerbated by the factual inaccuracies, which are plentiful. Jada Pinkett Smith, who played a prominent role in Pac’s life and the film, aired out her grievances with key details and plot points on Twitter. For Pac’s final performance in the movie, he plays “Hail Mary,” a song that wasn’t even released until after his death.