Miss Americana is a tricky movie. The film, which was one of the opening-night selections at this year’s Sundance Film Festival ahead of its Netflix release on January 31, is an often compelling look at the psychological mechanics governing one Taylor Swift—mega-famous singer-songwriter and frequent lightning rod for all kinds of disparate controversy. In trying to explicate the unique surreality of her situation, Swift makes for a fascinating documentary subject, both generous and withholding, frank and elusive. Lana Wilson’s film chases closely behind Swift as she leads the audience toward various laments and realizations; it’s as much a visual diary as anything else.
A diary, of course, is comprised of the chosen, curated truths of its author. Technically, Taylor Swift did not make Miss Americana. But her stamp is all over it, in its selective elisions and its careful structuring of a new celebrity identity. In that way, Miss Americana often plays as an intimately articulated press release, a bit of star-burnishing propaganda that is totally self-serving, if never malevolent.
Swift has probably earned the prerogative to manage her image in this long format. Hers is the heart, mind, and body that has been offered up to the masses for adulation and relentless scrutiny for many years now. Why shouldn’t she then get to assert some further agency and tell her story the way she thinks is most fair? We have given her our attention, and now she is asking us to hear, really hear, what she has to say—and, in the process, maybe learn who she really is.
I like the idea of that project, just as I quite like Swift’s music, the way it mixes confession with broader, more accessible sentiment. I have not followed the ins and outs of Swift’s much-covered personal life the way some people have, but I’ve always enjoyed the musical fruit born of that tumult. It’s been an interesting ride, watching (and listening to) Swift as she’s navigated her bumpy, glorious adolescence all the way to 30, where she’s just found herself.
Only, something cynical crept into my head while watching Miss Americana. It was an apprehension about just how managed this whole thing is, how precise it is in its mythology. Given the buzzy context of Sundance, with a lauded young documentarian bringing us the gospel of Swift on the first night of the festival, I’m left wondering if we should expect something more from the film—if its truths mean all that much when they’ve been so thoroughly vetted, arranged just so to bend a narrative in directions favorable to its subject.
Miss Americana sometimes feels like a snow job, like we are being hoodwinked into buying an idea with nothing to balance it against. The film captures some private moments that actually aren’t all that private, considering there was a camera there; it’s hard not to feel a growing suspicion that this is all for show. Not that the film is insincere, exactly, but it is at the very least shrewdly timed, its gradual epiphanies meted out to help shape Swift’s latest consumable iteration of self.
In the movie, Swift persuasively ruminates on the impossibly constant demand that female stars be ever evolving lest they risk obsolescence. I take her point. And I don’t begrudge Swift wanting to change, nor her wanting us to know that she has. But when this film’s arc is predicated so specifically on a dawning political conscience—we watch as, in 2018, Swift endorses candidates and alludes to a broader political ethos for the first time in her nearly two-decade career—one has to interrogate just what those politics are, and what their now public function really is. What were Swift’s ethics before the cameras descended (at her beckoning) to detail her coming out? How did they manifest in her unilluminated life, before the light showed up?
Miss Americana does not encourage us to seek out those answers. Instead, it asks that we trust in the journey as it’s told by its hero; it wants veneration without all the unseemly effort, the backlog evidence, the enduring receipts.
It was another calculation that the movie should premiere at a major festival a week before its release. There, in the biggest venue in Park City, was a room of supporters and critics—the former giving the latter loud, ardent cues for when to be moved, when to be impressed, when to cheer. I don’t think Swift, in the realest glimpses we get of her in the film, needs that boostering. She’s a genuine wit, a bogglingly adept musician, a savvy businessperson whose eagerness to be liked speaks to a strict upbringing we’re given no insight into.
The experience of watching Miss Americana will of course be quite different for those watching at home next Friday, or beyond. But here in the mountains of Utah, I felt almost held captive by the movie’s insistence, its deceptive tilts toward hagiography.
These are just some things to think about when watching the movie; they’re not reasons to avoid it. Wilson’s film is discursively engaging, jumping from one big Taylor era to another, from Kanye to the ill-timed cri de coeur of her Reputation album. The most arresting stretches of the film are when we see Swift simply doing her work, conjuring up perfectly vague but succinct lyrics as some producer prods at a synth next to her. (Or, frequently, as she tinkers away on the piano herself.) It’s a thrill watching her create, because she is so good at that. That’s when the whole thing feels truly organic, unvarnished, not compromised by any attempts at smoothing reality.
The film looks away from that pure artistry too often, turning instead to its limited, and far less satisfying, view of Swift’s complicated star profile. Swift has weathered a lot, a particularly lonely kind of social battering that cannot, it seems, be entirely soothed by millions of dollars and heaps of adulation. Sometimes the movie has an instructive value, in the considered way Swift talks about her eating disorder and about the pressures she has faced as a young woman in an industry famously inhospitable to and exploitative of young women. It’s admirable that Swift has reached a place of clarity about what all that struggle has done to her, what it has meant for her psyche and self-worth. I wish only that she had let Wilson do even more searching with difficult questions, that there wasn’t such a guarded control clenching the film’s conclusions.
I’ve no interest in litigating when Taylor Swift was or wasn’t unfairly maligned, when she was in the right or in the wrong about some feud or overshare. But she never existed alone; there was always a broader world, a bigger reality, surrounding her. Miss Americana pays frustratingly short shrift to all that lies beyond Swift’s immediate self-conception. The film is an interesting statement of intent from a newly active and aware famous person, but it ultimately serves one master.
I like a lot of what that master does as an artist, and if Miss Americana is just an introduction to a longer Swift treatise, some kind of preamble to a new design for living? I’m all for that. But as a standalone illustration, Miss Americana has too much blank space, voids in its portraiture that are all too quickly filled in with doubt.
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