“I’ll say it all and if we don’t want to use it, we can take it out,” says singer-songwriter Demi Lovato at the beginning of Michael D. Ratner’s limited documentary series. Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil. The project, which focuses on the 2018 overdose, does its best to emphasize candor as the highest priority. The declared desire to show the “true self” of the subject of a rock doc, to portray the “true” story in an environment whose authorized subjectivity ensures only the paradox, is nothing new. Consequently, the rock document is an environment that does not consistently achieve the stated goal.
But Dancing with the Devil it is a different beast, and not just because efforts are needed to telegraph how the material exceeds the expectations of its subjects. “Are we talking about heroin?” Do we do that? Lovato’s good friend Matthew Scott Montgomery asks about his interviewer at one point. Indeed, we are. Rarely is a contemporary documentary with a pop star in its center so invested going there as Dancing with the Devil it is, and even less frequently, delivered to the extent that it makes this production in four parts YouTube Originals. (The first two installments fell on Tuesday; the other two will be released in the next two weeks. All together, it’s about 90 minutes of material, enough to make a feature-length documentary.)
Woven into the text is what this is could were: A fairly standard concert film that was filmed during the Lovato 2018 Don’t Tell Me You Love Me world tour. In the Dance, Lovato reflects on this project, which was abandoned following the overdose on July 24, 2018. It did not let the production know what was happening behind closed doors. Lovato’s friend / former sober comrade Sirah describes the effort as “insincere.”
The tour document, in other words, would have been yet another gentle biography of celebrities – the kind that ends up showing more of the same thing, an extremely clean, distorted portrait that carries someone’s social media presence in the film. Low-stakes, low-yield tickets from Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Paris Hilton typify the dilution of what was a state-of-the-art way of coloring into a public profile already boldly outlined (the height of the genre is that of Alek Keshishian’s 1991 Madonna: Truth or Gifte, and the 1970 Rolling Stones profile of the Maysles brothers, Give me shelter, is not behind). What was once cinema is too often a painful audio-visual press release for an era in which the fear of not being misunderstood prevents many from saying anything, any consequences.
Lovato was sober for six years when she relapsed in the 2018 tournament. Wine led to drugs, which led to heavier drugs: Until she overdosed, she took crack and heroin. She said her dealer sexually assaulted her on the night of her overdose: “I was literally left dead after he took advantage of me,” she says, avoiding the use of the word “rape.”
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Devil tells the story of Lovato’s OD in exact detail. She says she had three strokes, a heart attack and pneumonia as a result. When he arrived at the hospital, he was legally blind and says he still has vision problems as a result of the damage that OD did to his brain. Before she was resurrected, she turned blue. Her assistant at the time, Jordan Jackson, found her unanswered, but feared she would have trouble calling 911. She did it anyway and saved Lovato’s life.
Without blaming, Devil contextualizes Lovato’s countless battles. She was estranged from her father, who was also an alcoholic, drug addict and abuser. The beauty contests she participated in as a child “completely damaged” her self-esteem, she says. She cut herself and developed an eating disorder – her bulimia was so bad at one point, she says, that she spilled blood. She remembers, at 18, her sobriety was hindered, she remembers – she finally rebelled.
A document that prioritizes sincerity at this level is the perfect vehicle for Lovato, whose reality can be completely arresting, as when she says dryly in front of the camera: “I had my fair share of sexual traumas throughout my childhood. [and] she reports that she lost her virginity through rape at the age of 15 and, about a month later, had consensual sex with her rapist in an attempt to fight power. She did the same with her dealer – Shortly after her incredibly public overdose, she invited him to come back (this time by consensus) and stand up. “I wanted to rewrite his choice to violate me. I wanted it to be my choice,” she reflected.
This is not an easy pill to swallow and the great courage that Lovato shows here is not only in the description of his survival, but the seemingly counterintuitive means he used to ensure it. “Recreations of manual trauma” is how she classifies her behavior. She takes a clear risk in being judged for what might turn out to be poor decisions, providing food for the ruthless to doubt her trauma.
The weight and complexity of her story, however, only serve to serve her. She explains her surprise at her overdose – she thought she was safe smoking what turned out to be fentanyl. “I’m not saying I didn’t use needles, but I didn’t inject them that night, I smoked them,” she says, risking the stigma of a hardcore injection drug user. She accepts responsibility for avoiding her father, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. While she built her public profile, in part on the basis of her mental illness lawyer, she did not extend to her father the same compassion she preached. She discusses her brief commitment to the beginning of the closure with a guy she barely knew – her own, if ever, a clear indication of the madness that results from living life with so many people. (When you make impulsive decisions that you announce to the world, you need to direct them back when they don’t extend.)
Most cursed, Lovato admits that her egocentrism at the beginning of her most recent recovery has prevented her from understanding how her addiction affects others. Perhaps no one has suffered more serious consequences than Dani Vitale, Lovato’s dancer and backup choreographer, whose star attended the birthday with an overdose. Lovato is very careful to describe how well she hid her drug habit from her friends and to point out that Vitale did not promote or engage in drug use with Lovato. However, Vitale has been accused of Lovato’s OD and says she has received thousands of harassment messages every day, some with death threats. (The harassment lasted more than a year, according to Vitale.) As a result, Vitale lost his job and was followed by paparazzi hired by TMZ. Lovato openly regrets how long it took her to exonerate her friend and collaborator.
The weird thing about Dancing with the Devil The more Lovato talked, the less convinced I was that I would want to spend any time with her at the same time, the more I admired her boldness. It is a rare thing to be confronted with a superstar who masters his flaws, who risks being taken as something less than a shining pillar of society. In the film, the more he risks being interpreted as a shitty person, the better he breaks away.
Dance it is not entirely devoid of the clandestine advertorial stench. It is named after a song from her new album, which we see in the recordings of her recording towards the end of the series, which positions the whole exercise in telling the truth as a teaser for Lovato’s next era. Too many of her sincere scenes with her friends exclusively involve Lovato’s discussion (and, for the most part, I simply destroy her with compliments). Obviously, it is the central point of this project Dance is a great montage of images of people talking about Lovato, even when they are with her. However, these sincere moments give a sense of unbalanced interactions and possibly unbalanced relationships. But these are probably storytelling in themselves and there is little room for symmetry anyway.
Dancing with the Devil it is not cinema – it is largely made up of images of Lovato’s talking head and her inner circle that could easily have been translated into a written oral history of her overdose. But its stakes are dangerously high. Lovato’s audacity to tell a messy story and to hold his choices and egocentrism is practically unmatched. Taken with The child 90, Soleil Moon Frye’s recent Hulu documentary, made up mainly of movies she shot as a teenager in the ’90s, spending time with other famous teenagers, in which drug use, shitty talk and sex abound, exists a strong argument that must be argued that we are entering an era of neorealism of celebrities. Fans of this style of filmmaking will be lucky if other celebrities realize the bar that Lovato and Frye’s documents have put in responsibility and sincerity and try to overcome it. Self-hagiography will continue to be a temptation for all who live in public; Lovato models how boldly resistance to this modern convention can show.
Devil it presents a thorny narrative that never goes the way it should. “My story from MeToo says that someone did this to me and never had a problem with it,” says Lovato of her rape at 15 years old. “They were never taken out of the movie they were in.” Lovato seems to have everything anyone her age could want – fame, fortune, loyal family and friends – except for the consolation of a predictable story. She boldly hypothesized that her own bipolar diagnosis was, in fact, a misdiagnosis that she never bothered to publicly correct despite (or perhaps because of) her role as a mental health advocate. She shocks and really without any obligation, she admits towards the end of the year Dance that, after all, she is not completely sober today – she still drinks and uses marijuana. This leads to a wide chorus of Greek friends and associates weighing in on her decision to return to use, including interviews of her disapproving manager, Scooter Braun, and Elton John, who is sober. John shouted into the room, “Moderation doesn’t work. I am sorry! ”
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the DevilThe most daring move is to allow his superstar to be wrong. He’s still learning, he might make mistakes. She’s young! There is a strong suggestion that part of her learning process involves making mistakes, but to what extent does she actually take her education? Stay tuned to find out.