Sundance Film Review: Taylor Swift Doc Miss Americana Probes the Loneliness of Fame

This review is part of our Sundance 2020 coverage.

The Pitch: Taylor Swift is at once America’s most emotionally accessible daddy superstar and among the most difficult to relate to. She’s effectively grown up alongside her fanbase; she likens like to hear her chorus as” various kinds of like see my diary ,” and her self-professed motives for her operate are the validation and adulation of others. But, of course, that hasn’t always been that way: for as popular as Swift is, “shes been” bristles against the expectations of her fanbase and the public, and how it weighs on her body and soul alike. In Miss Americana, chairman Lana Wilson turns her camera to these involved facets of Taylor Swift’s persona, capturing a young woman who’s been inescapably famous for half her life, and what she does when she eventually decides to do that renown count for something.

You Belong With Me: Even if you don’t listen to Swift’s music( and let’s face it, you have whether you knew it or not ), you’ve assembled an mind about her. Is she the sweet girl-next-door? Is she an inspiration to women everywhere? Is she a impostor, carefully calculated media personality who wouldn’t be far-famed except for Kanye West? To its ascribe, Miss Americana copes with all of these questions, even if it comes apart with an image of the singer that Taylor( and her sail of publicists) would certainly like presented.

But even that ability for disbelief and incredulity is a matter which Wilson( and, most pointedly, Swift) seems all too aware of. Much of Miss Americana plays out like the conventional music-icon documentary of this kind: archival footage of their humble beginnings, teary-eyed confessionals to the camera, whether Wilson’s or their own cell phones; periodic detours to exactly enjoy the songcraft and showmanship on display during her demoes. Those who only experience Swift’s songs will be thrilled by Miss Americana’s fly-on-the-wall glimpses of her songwriting process, as she joyously plinks through tunes and scribbles song poetics on her phone, sharing in her producers’ delight as they ultimately nail this infectious melody or that cuttingly honest verse.

Throughout it all, nonetheless, is an intriguing, overruling thesis: Taylor Swift came robbed on the validation of her supporters through an early age, and it’s only recently that she’s started to recognize that and move away from the dopamine smacked of Grammys and universal adoration.

Taylor Swift, photo by David Brendan Hall

Reputation: Despite Swift’s status as America’s Sweetheart, her jaunt has come with no small number of setbacks, which Wilson implants with confrontational sharpness. Her first large-scale scandal( Kanye’s on-stage trolling of her MTV Music Awards win) is revealed as the first big hit to her compulsive need to be loved. From there, it’s a long, slow coiling as Wilson plasters one concern-trolling thinkpiece headline after another on screen. Whether the government has it’s justified to not like Taylor Swift or disbelieve her motives, Wilson effectively gives the kind of snowball effect such world-wide vitriol can have on someone, especially one whose self-worth is tied so closely to public opinion.

But that’s in the past, and Miss Americana is all about Swift’s comeback from those obstacles. The Swift of Wilson’s contemporary footage( filmed during her Reputation tour in 2018 and her early songwriting sessions for Lover) is still smart, spirited, and accessible, but there’s a more wearied line to her. She’s gone through the crucible of public refusal( and, as she candidly illustrates in one scene, an anorexia nervosa ), and has chosen to learn some powerful lessons from it and move forward.

Taylor Swift

The Man: That next move, it turns out, is politics, Miss Americana presenting Swift’s newfound activism as the answer to the emptiness of her need for” those taps on the premier ,” as she calls them. Wilson steers us through Swift’s countersuit against a morning-show DJ who sought her on a red carpet and got fired after she told her story. The courtroom was a agonizing experience, Swift documents to her followers during a conduct of “Clean”, but one she’s stronger for having endured.

Emboldened, she takes that vigour to her dwelling state of Tennessee for the 2018 midterms, endorsing Marsha Blackburn’s Democratic opponent. It’s exhilarate to see Swift so openly political, impassioned, and well-educated on the subject.” Those are not Tennessee Christian evaluates ,” she hollers to her advisors about Blackburn’s anti-gay, anti-woman programmes as they alarm her not to speak out. Wilson reminds us of the consequences that befell another great country act spurned by its public for politics, the Dixie Chicks; the hulk specter of their exile from country music( a genre Swift has outgrown, but whose DNA she still carries within her) weighs heavily on her decision.

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And hitherto, on the other side of it, Swift clearly meets a sense of name with progressive crusades, and Wilson’s camera allows us to see peeks of a woman who, yes, guess very carefully about how she comes across but does so for good reason.” You’ve always got to have a strategy” for your action, suggests Swift, because you need to present yourself in the best possible light to have beings eschewed praising you.” But “when youre doing” that, they call you calculating .” It’s these minutes that, regardless of your feelings on Swift herself, furnish an inkling into the impossible rules society moves up not just for notorious papa icons, but women as a group.

Editors’ PicksSundance Film Review: Taylor Swift Doc Miss Americana Probes the Loneliness of Fame Clint Worthington