Battle of the Sexes suffers from a problem shared by many well-crafted biopics: it knows far too well whose side the audience is supposed to be on.

The 2017 film, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, works as a smart, energetic, and timely sports drama. But in doing so, it also simplifies the real story behind Billie Jean King's famous match against Bobby Riggs.

On screen, everything falls neatly into place. There's a heroine fighting for equality and dignity. There's a loud, outdated chauvinist who needs to be defeated. And there's a historic match that changes the world forever.

Technically, none of that is false.

The problem is that the real story was messier, less convenient—and, as is often the case, far more interesting precisely where the film smooths off the rough edges.

The match itself, played on September 20, 1973, really was enormous.

Houston's Astrodome welcomed 30,472 spectators, while the television broadcast attracted around 50 million viewers in the United States alone. Worldwide, the audience was estimated at roughly 90 million.

For Billie Jean King, it wasn't simply a tennis match—or even just a spectacle. By then she had already spent years fighting tennis' establishment over unequal prize money. She had helped create the breakaway Virginia Slims Tour that eventually became the WTA, and she understood that losing to the 55-year-old Riggs could damage not only her own reputation, but the credibility of women's tennis itself.

King later admitted she genuinely believed that defeat would set women back for years. In that respect, the film gets it exactly right. The stakes weren't symbolic. They were historic. But this is also where the film begins leaning too heavily in one direction. It eagerly turns Bobby Riggs into a convenient symbol of male arrogance.

To be fair, Riggs himself encouraged that image. He publicly called himself "a male chauvinist pig," constantly provoked people, marketed the match like a circus, and understood better than almost anyone that controversy sold tickets.

But the real Bobby Riggs wasn't simply a cardboard villain. He was also an aging hustler, an entertainer, and a master showman who knew how to package even his own absurdity as entertainment. Even Billie Jean King later said that much of his bravado felt more like performance than genuine hostility—although she never denied that he sincerely believed at least some of what he said. In reality, Riggs was several things at once: sexist, clown, promoter, and salesman. The film is much more comfortable reducing him to only one of those identities.

More importantly, filmmakers are naturally drawn to a clean "hero versus villain" structure. But the real conflict extended far beyond Bobby Riggs. The real battle was against the entire power structure of tennis. Against Jack Kramer. Against unequal prize money. Against the dismissive treatment of women's tennis. Against a system that forced King and the Original 9 to fight simply for the right to exist.

TIME correctly pointed out that the film captures King's conflict with Kramer, her break from tennis' leadership, and the role of Gladys Heldman and Virginia Slims. Ironically, though, that's also where the film's biggest contradiction appears. Its true antagonist isn't Riggs alone. It's the structure of the sport itself.

Yet by the time the credits roll, audiences mostly remember one loud man wearing oversized glasses. The film's most interesting crack appears in the relationship between King and Riggs themselves. TIME also noted that the movie invents a much closer relationship before the match than actually existed. King later said she barely knew him beforehand. More importantly, however, the two didn't spend the rest of their lives as sworn enemies.

Quite the opposite. They became genuine friends and remained close until Riggs died in 1995. King later recalled speaking with him shortly before his death, when they told each other they loved one another. In other interviews, she added another revealing detail. She respected Bobby Riggs.

He had been one of her sporting heroes. To her, he was never simply the ridiculous caricature he often pretended to be. That emotional aftertaste is almost entirely absent from the film—and its absence matters because it breaks the tidy moral narrative. As a result, Battle of the Sexes succeeds as a modern statement. It is less successful as history.

It does an excellent job explaining why the match mattered—for women's sports, gender equality, and King's public legacy. But it spends less time showing that the "Battle of the Sexes" was also an extraordinarily sophisticated media production in which both participants understood exactly how to create a spectacle.

Riggs wasn't merely the embodiment of patriarchy. He was also one of the architects of the event itself. Without his showmanship, King's victory would never have carried the same historical impact. And King respected him enough to recognize him not simply as an opponent, but as a complicated collaborator in a cultural phenomenon they had built together—each in their own way.

Fifty years later, the WTA itself described that evening as something halfway between a sporting event, Hollywood production, and a championship prize fight.

Battle of the Sexes doesn't rewrite history. It gets the winner right. It captures the significance of the moment. But it makes the story too neat. It transforms a chaotic, ironic, occasionally absurd collision of sport, politics, marketing, and personal relationships into a straightforward morality play. The real story is stronger precisely because Billie Jean King didn't defeat a caricature.

She defeated a far more complicated man. And afterward, she became his friend. That doesn't diminish her victory. It makes it feel even more human.