“I’ll just say it all and if we don’t want to use it, we can take it out,” says singer and songwriter Demi Lovato at the start of Michael D. Ratner’s limited documentary series Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil. The project, which focuses on its 2018 overdose, does everything to highlight candor as its top priority. The declared desire to show “the real me” of the subject of a rock doc, to portray the “true” story in a medium whose authorized subjectivity almost guarantees the paradox, is nothing new. Consequently, rock doc is a medium that consistently fails in its stated goal.
But Dancing with the demon it is a different beast, and not just because it takes the trouble to telegraph how the material exceeds the expectations of its participants. “Are we talking about heroin? Are we doing this? ”Asks Lovato’s good friend, Matthew Scott Montgomery, from his interviewer at one point. In fact, we are. It is rarely a contemporary documentary with a pop star at its center so invested in going there how Dancing with the demon it is, and even more rarely does it live up to the same proportion as this four-part YouTube Originals production. (The first two installments fell on Tuesday; the remaining two will be released in the next two weeks. Together, there are about 90 minutes of material, enough to make a full-length documentary.)
Fabric in the text is what this it could has been: A fairly common concert film that was filmed during the 2018 Don’t Tell Me You Love Me world tour. DancingLovato reflects on this project, which was abandoned after her July 24, 2018 overdose. She would not let the production know what was going on behind closed doors. Sirah, Lovato’s friend / ex-sober companion, describes the venture as “hypocritical”.
The tour doc, in other words, would have been more of a bland celebrity biography – the kind that ends up showing more of the same, a distorted and highly cured portrait that transports a person’s presence on social media to the middle of the film. Katy Perry’s low-participation, low-income entries, Taylor Swift, and Paris Hilton typify the dilution of what used to be an avant-garde way of coloring in a public profile already boldly outlined (the height of the genre is Alek Keshishian, 1991 Madonna: Truth or Giveand, and the profile of the Rolling Stones Maysles brothers in 1970, Give me shelter, is not far behind). What used to be cinema, is often a painstaking audiovisual press release for a time when the fear of being misunderstood prevents many from saying anything, anything important.
Lovato had been sober for six years when she relapsed on her 2018 tour. Wine led to drugs, which led to heavier drugs: by the time she overdosed, she had taken crack and heroin. Her dealer, she said, sexually assaulted her the night of her overdose. “I was literally left to die after he took advantage of me,” she says, avoiding the use of the word “rape”.
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Devil tells Lovato’s OD story in exact detail. She says that, as a result, she had three strokes, a heart attack and contracted pneumonia. When she returned to the hospital, she was legally blind and said she still has vision problems due to the damage her overdose has caused to her brain. Before being revived, she turned blue. Her assistant at the time, Jordan Jackson, found her indifferent, 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 user and abuser. The beauty contests she participated in as a child “completely damaged” her self-esteem, she reports. She cut herself and developed an eating disorder – her bulimia was so strong at one point, she says, that she vomited blood. Sobriety was imposed on her at 18 by her team, she remembers – she finally rebelled.
A document that prioritizes openness to this degree is the perfect vehicle for Lovato, whose objectivity can be utterly captivating, as when she says dryly to the camera: “I had my fair share of sexual trauma during childhood [and] adolescence. “She reports that she lost her virginity to rape at age 15 and about a month later, she had consensual sex with her rapist in an attempt to fight for power. She did the same with her drug dealer – shortly after her incredibly public overdose, she invited him to come back for sex (this time by consensus) and get high. “I wanted to rewrite your choice to rape me. I wanted it to be my choice,” she reflects.
This is hardly an easy-to-swallow pill and the great courage that Lovato demonstrates here is not only in describing his survival, but in the apparently counter-intuitive means that she employed to guarantee it. “Recreation of trauma in textbooks” is how she categorizes her behavior. She runs a clear risk of being judged for what may seem like a bad decision, giving food to those who have no compassion to doubt her trauma.
The weight and complexity of its history, however, only serve. She explains her surprise at the overdose – she thought she was protecting herself by smoking what turned out to be fentanyl. “I’m not saying I didn’t use needles, but that night I wasn’t injecting, I was smoking,” she says, risking the stigma of a hardcore injecting drug user. She accepts responsibility for avoiding her father, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Although she built her public profile in part because she is an advocate for mental illness, she did not extend the same compassion to her father that she was preaching. She discusses her short engagement towards the beginning of the blockade with a guy she barely knew – a self, if ever, a clear indication of the madness that results from living a life so publicly. (When you make impulsive decisions that you announce to the world, you have to take them back when they don’t work.)
More damning, Lovato admits that her self-centeredness during the beginning of her most recent recovery prevented her from understanding how her addiction affected others. Possibly no one suffered more serious consequences than Dani Vitale, dancer and choreographer of Lovato, whose birthday party the star attended the night before the overdose. Lovato is very careful in describing how well she hid her drug addiction from her friends and emphasized that Vitale did not promote or become involved in drug use with Lovato. Still, Vitale was blamed for Lovato’s overdose and says he received thousands of harassing messages daily, some death threats. (The harassment lasted more than a year, according to Vitale.) As a result, Vitale lost his job and was followed by paparazzi employed by TMZ. Lovato openly regrets how long it took her to dismiss her friend and collaborator.
The weird thing about Dancing with the demon is that the more Lovato spoke, the less I was convinced that I would like to spend some time with her and, at the same time, the more I admired her boldness. In fact, it is rare to be confronted with a superstar who recognizes his flaws, who risks being taken as something less than a brilliant pillar of society. In the film, the more she risks being interpreted as a shitty person, the better she does.
Dancing it is not entirely devoid of the stench of clandestine advertorial. The name comes from a song from his new album that we see images from his recording at the end of the series, which positions this whole exercise in a naked and raw narrative as a teaser for the next era of Lovato. Many candid scenes of her hanging out with her friends involve them just arguing over Lovato (and mostly just giving her praise). Obviously, the focus of this project is on her then Dancing it is a great montage of images of people talking about Lovato, even when they are next to her. However, these sincere moments give a feeling of unbalanced interactions and, possibly, unbalanced relationships. But these are, perhaps, revealing in themselves and there is little room for symmetry here anyway.
Dancing with the demon it is not cinema – it is largely composed of footage of Lovato and his inner circle that could have easily been translated into an oral written history of his overdose. But your stakes are dangerously high. Lovato’s audacity in telling a complicated story and assuming his choices and self-centeredness is practically unsurpassed. Taken with Kid 90, Soleil Moon Frye’s recent doc Hulu predominantly consisted of footage she shot when she was a teenager in the 90s, dating other teen celebrities in which drug use, shit talk and sex abound, there is a strong argument that we are entering an era of celebrity neo-realism. Fans of this style of shooting will be lucky if other stars realize the barrier that Lovato and Frye’s doctors have set in full responsibility and openness, and try to overcome it. Self-hagiography will continue to be a temptation for all who live publicly; Lovato shows how bold the resistance to this modern convention can seem.
Devil presents a thorny narrative that never goes out the way it should. “My MeToo story is me telling that someone did this to me and never had a problem with it,” says Lovato of her rape at age 15. “They were never taken out of the film they were in.” Lovato seems to have everything that his age could wish for – fame, wealth, loyal family and friends – except the consolation of a predictable story. She boldly hypothesizes 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 shockingly, and really has no obligation, admits at the end of Dancing that she’s not totally sober today – she still drinks and uses marijuana. This leads to a broad Greek chorus of friends and associates evaluating their decision to return to use, including interviews with their disapproving manager, Scooter Braun, and Elton John, who is sober. John yells at the camera: “Moderation doesn’t work. Excuse me!”
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devilthe most audacious move to is to allow your superstar subject to be wrong. She is still learning, she can still make mistakes. She is young! There is a strong suggestion that part of your learning process involves making these mistakes, but how far is your education really going? Stay tuned to find out.