Miss Americana (2020)
Taylor Swift occupies a peculiar position in contemporary culture: she is one of the most commercially successful recording artists on the planet, a figure whose every public move generates column inches, and yet she has remained, for years, genuinely difficult to read as a private person. Miss Americana, released on Netflix in January 2020 and produced through Tremolo Productions, is an attempt to change that. Director Lana Wilson was granted what appears to be unusually candid access across a period that included Swift's political emergence, a well-publicised sexual assault court case, and the recording of her 2019 album Lover. The result is a music documentary that is less a career retrospective and more a portrait of someone working out, in real time, who she wants to be when the cameras are rolling and when they are not.
Wilson had made her name with The Departure (2017), a documentary about a Japanese Buddhist priest contemplating suicide prevention, which earned considerable praise on the festival circuit for its patience and its refusal to editorialise. That instinct carries over here. Rather than structuring the film as a greatest-hits package, she builds something closer to a character study, using archive footage alongside newly shot material to trace Swift's trajectory from a Tennessee girl competing in talent shows through to a globally recognised cultural force reckoning with the costs of that position. The screenplay credit is not available, which in a documentary of this kind often signals a looser, observational approach rather than a tightly scripted narrative, and that is broadly what you get. For a companion piece on a very different kind of observational documentary, see also The White Diamond (2004), Werner Herzog's portrait of a man and an obsession, which shares something of the same interest in accessing a subject's interior life through proximity rather than interrogation. I also covered Of Time and the City (2008), Terence Davies's more formally constructed documentary essay, which offers an interesting contrast in how non-fiction filmmakers can shape personal material into something that speaks beyond its immediate subject.
The cast, such as it is in a documentary, brings in several figures from Swift's professional and personal orbit. Todrick Hall, the choreographer and YouTube performer who has been a close collaborator, appears with a warmth that suggests genuine friendship rather than managed access. Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco, who co-wrote and recorded "Me!" with Swift, features in recording footage that gives a rare glimpse of the studio dynamic. Producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff, who has worked with Swift across several albums and is one of the more quietly influential figures in contemporary pop production, is present throughout in a way that usefully contextualises how her sound has shifted over the years. Interior designer Bobby Berk, known from television's Queer Eye, rounds out the familiar faces in what is broadly a picture of a woman surrounded by a chosen, loyal circle.
Cinematographer Emily Topper shoots the film with a palette that moves between the warm, slightly overexposed tones of backstage and home footage and the cooler, more composed framing of formal interviews. There is a consistent attention to faces at rest, to the moments between performed confidence and private uncertainty, which suits Wilson's approach well. The editing, handled by Greg O'Toole and Lindsay Utz, manages the tonal shifts between concert spectacle and quieter domestic scenes without the piece feeling either like a promotional reel or an unwanted intrusion. Composer Alex Somers, perhaps best known for his long association with Sigur Rós and his score for Captain Fantastic, provides an understated instrumental thread that sits beneath the film's own music without competing with it. The score is unobtrusive in a way that is clearly a choice rather than an absence.
Let me lay my cards on the table: I could not name you a single Taylor Swift song.
I know she exists, I know she is enormous, and that is about the sum of it, so I am plainly nowhere near the target audience for Miss Americana. What I am is a devoted fan of country music, of the great songwriters, your Townes Van Zandts, Blaze Foleys, Guy Clarks and Emmylou Harrises, so when the film opened with Swift talking about her country roots, I sat up, hopeful.
I will be straight, though: her music is not for me. It is perfectly fine, but to my ear it does not come within a mile of the songwriters I hold dearest, and no amount of good documentary was ever going to change that. Here is the thing that caught me off guard, mind. The documentary is quite good regardless.
Lana Wilson traces Swift's story back to a talent-show kid and follows her growth from there, and there is an unguarded vulnerability to it, not least in a scene where one of her albums is passed over for a major award and you watch the disappointment land.
And that is the fair verdict of an outsider: as a portrait of a person, it works, even on someone who came in cold and stayed fairly cool on the music itself. I have no doubt it means a great deal more to those who love her, and if you are one of them, you will probably adore it.
For the rest of us, it is still a well-made, watchable film about fame, growing up in public, and finding the nerve to speak your mind. Three stars, a good documentary about an artist I do not much listen to, which is about the fairest thing I can offer it.
Miss Americana sits within a crowded tradition of authorised music documentaries, a form that always risks feeling like an extended press release however good the access. That it avoids that fate more often than not is down to Wilson's steady hand and Swift's apparent willingness to let unflattering moments stay in the cut. Whether it will mean much to viewers who arrive without any particular investment in its subject is a fair and open question, and one worth sitting with. Documentaries about fame are, in the end, documentaries about us as much as about their subjects, and on that level this one earns its running time. It is, to borrow a phrase, a film that does its job without making a song and dance about it.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-09-22
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Miss Americana (2020) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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