“I’m just going to say it all and if we don’t want to use it, we can get it out,” explains singer-songwriter Demi Lovato at the start of Michael D. Ratner’s limited documentary series. Demi Lovato: Dancing with the DevilThe project, which focuses on her 2018 overdose, is committed to highlighting sincerity as the top priority. The expressed desire to show ‘the real me’ of the subject of a rock doc, to portray the ‘true’ story in a medium whose authorized subjectivity is almost certain of a paradox, is nothing new. Accordingly, the rock doc is a medium that consistently falls short of its stated goal.
But Dancing with the devil is a different beast, and not just because it takes effort 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 his interviewer at one point. Indeed we are. Rarely has a contemporary documentary centered on a pop star been so invested. go there like Dancing with the devil is, and rarer still, to the extent that this four-part YouTube Originals production does. (The first two episodes were canceled Tuesday; the remaining two will be released in the next two weeks. All told, it’s about 90 minutes of material, enough to make a full-length documentary.)
Textured in the text is what makes this could have been: A fairly standard concert film that was shot during Lovato’s 2018 Don’t Tell Me You Love Me world tour. In To dance, Lovato reflects on that project, which was abandoned in the wake of her July 24, 2018 overdose. She didn’t want to let the production know what was going on behind closed doors. Lovato’s friend / former level-headed companion Sirah describes the pursuit as “unfair”.
In other words, the tour document would have been another boring celebrity biography – the kind that ends up showing more of the same, a highly curated, distorted portrait that conveys someone’s social media presence in the medium of film. Low-stakes, low-yield entries from Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Paris Hilton typify the dilution of what used to be a hypermodern way of coloring in an already boldly defined public profile (the pinnacle of the genre is Alek Keshishian’s 1991 Madonna: Truth or Dare, and the Maysles brothers’ 1970s Rolling Stones profile, Give me shelter, is not far behind). What was once a cinema is too often a meticulous audiovisual press release for an era in which The fear of being misunderstood keeps many from saying something, something important.
Lovato had been sober for six years when she relapsed on her 2018 tour. Wine led to drugs, which led to hard 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 for 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 down to the smallest detail. She says she suffered three strokes, a heart attack and pneumonia as a result. When she got to the hospital, she was legally blind and says she still has vision problems due to the damage her OD has done to her brain. Before she came back to life, she turned blue. Her then-assistant, Jordan Jackson, found herself unresponsive, but feared she would get in trouble if she called the emergency number. 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 pageants 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 bad at one point, she says, that she vomited blood. Sobriety was forced on her by her team at the age of 18, she recalls – she eventually rebelled.
A document that prioritizes sincerity to this extent is the perfect vehicle for Lovato, whose sobriety can be utterly arresting, such as when she says dryly to the camera, “I’ve had a fair share of sexual trauma during my childhood. [and] Teens. ”She reports that at 15 she lost her virginity to rape and about a month later, had sex with her rapist in an attempt to regain power. She did the same to her dealer – shortly after her incredibly public overdose, she invited off him to have sex (this time by mutual consent) and get high. “I wanted to rewrite his choice to violate me. I wanted it to be my choice,” she recalls.
This is hardly an easy pill to swallow and the great courage Lovato shows here is not only in describing her survival, but also in the seemingly counterintuitive means she used to ensure it. “Textbook reenactments of trauma,” is how she categorizes her behavior. She takes a clear risk of being judged on what may seem like bad decisions, and provides food for the compassion-free people to question her trauma.
However, the weight and complexity of her story only serves it. She explains that she was surprised at her overdose – she thought she was safe by smoking what turned out to be fentanyl. “I’m not saying I didn’t use needles, but that night I didn’t inject it, I smoked it,” she says, risking the stigma of a hardcore, injecting drug user. She accepts responsibility for shunning her father, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Although she had built up her public profile in part as an advocate for mental illness, she did not show her father the same compassion that she preached. She discusses her brief engagement near the start of the lockdown with a man she barely knew – a person of her own if any, a clear indication of the folly that comes from living such a public life. (If you make impulsive decisions you announce to the world, you have to backtrack on them if they don’t come true.)
Most devastatingly, Lovato admits that her self-centeredness during the early part of her most recent recovery prevented her from understanding how her addiction was affecting others. Perhaps no one suffered more serious consequences than Dani Vitale, Lovato’s background dancer and choreographer whose birthday party the star attended the night before her overdose. Lovato is very careful to describe how well she hid her drug use from her friends and to emphasize that Vitale did not promote or engage in drug use with Lovato. Nonetheless, Vitale was blamed for Lovato’s OD, saying she received thousands of intimidating messages daily, including some death threats. (The harassment lasted more than a year, according to Vitale.) As a result, Vitale lost work and was followed by paparazzi employed by TMZ. Lovato openly regrets how long it took to exonerate her friend and co-worker.
The weird thing about it Dancing with the devil the more Lovato talked, the less convinced I was going to want to spend every moment with her, while at the same time daring to admire her. Indeed, it is rare to be faced with a superstar who acknowledges his shortcomings, who risks being perceived as anything less than a shining pillar of society. The more she runs the risk of being interpreted as a worthless person in the film, the better she comes across.
To dance is not entirely devoid of the smell of clandestine advertorial. It is named after a song on her new album of which we see footage from her recording towards the end of the series, in which this whole exercise telling in bare truth as a teaser for Lovato’s next era. Too many candid scenes where she hangs out with her friends involves only talking about Lovato (and usually just complimenting her). Obviously, the focus of this project is on her To dance is a large montage of images of people talking about Lovato, even when they are standing next to her. Nevertheless, these candid moments convey a sense of skewed interactions and potentially skewed relationships. But these may be significant in themselves and there is little room for symmetry here anyway.
Dancing with the devil is not a cinema – it consists largely of talking images of Lovato and her inner circle that could have been easily translated into a written oral history of her overdose. But the stakes are dangerously high. Lovato’s guts to tell a messy story and to internalize her choices and self-centeredness is practically unsurpassed. Included Child 90, Soleil Moon Frye’s recent Hulu document, which consists mainly of footage she shot as a teenager in the ’90s and hung out with other famous teens in which drug use, shit-talking, and sex abound, there’s a strong argument that we join an era of celebrity neorealism. Fans of this style of filmmaking will be lucky when other stars realize and try to exceed the bar that Lovato and Frye’s teachers have set in sheer responsibility and candor. Auto-hagiography will continue to be a temptation to anyone living in public; Lovato shows what daring resistance to this modern convention can look like.
Devil presents a thorny story that never quite goes as it should. “My MeToo story is that I said someone did this to me and they never got in trouble,” Lovato says of her rape when she was 15. “They were never taken out of the movie they were in.” Lovato seems to have everything a person her age could wish for – fame, fortune, loyal family and friends – except the comfort of a predictable story. She boldly assumes that her own bipolar diagnosis was in fact a misdiagnosis that she never publicly corrected despite (or perhaps because of) her role as a mental health advocate. She admits shockingly, and basically without obligation, towards the end of To dance that she is not completely sober today – she still drinks and uses marijuana. This leads to a wide-ranging Greek chorus of friends and associates considering her decision to resume using, including interviews with her disapproving manager, Scooter Braun, and sober Elton John. John shouts into the camera: ‘Moderation doesn’t work. Sorry!”
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the DevilThe most daring move is to get his superstar subject wrong. She’s still learning, maybe she’s still making mistakes. She is young! There is a strong suggestion that part of her learning process involves making the said mistakes, but to what extent is her education actually following? Stay tuned to find out.