This documentary is an eye-catcher

Céline Dion has disappeared from the public eye, or at least from the big stage, since announcing her diagnosis of stiff-person syndrome in 2022, her eyes welling up with tears and regrets about having to cancel a tour. While the iconic power-ballad voice of her (or any) generation has largely kept the details of her rare neurological condition secret behind screens, Irene Taylor’s vibrant and unflinching documentary I Am: Céline Dion offers fans and audiences a sometimes disturbingly frank and up-close and personal tour of Dion’s psychological free fall following that diagnosis. Forgoing talking heads in favor of a portrait in which Dion insisted she do the talking, this is a rare, nonfictional chronicle of an artist that also avoids hagiography — we see Dion at her lowest point because it reminds us of who she is at her best.

“Your Very Best” is so much more than “My Heart Will Go On” or any other single you most remember the Quebec singer for. “I traveled the world and I saw nothing,” Dion tells the camera, in the presence of two of the three sons she has with her husband and producer René Angélil, who died in 2016. (Angélil is surprisingly not very present in this film, which reveals his presence only through brief shots of his funeral rather than a palette of home videos or other cinematic elegies.) What she’s saying is that her cross-cultural songwriting has taken her all over the world, but with each tour stop never came one of those revelatory travel moments that affect us all. Instead, she lived a life in dressing rooms and on stages, hiding an abnormal neurological condition that now prevents her from singing with as much dignity as she once did.

Rather than positioning Dion in manicured interviews or against the talking heads that are all the rage in all documentaries these days, filmmaker Irene Taylor follows her in her Las Vegas home, where she is retiring from performances that her illness has forced her to abandon. There she tries to regain her strength while taking constant medication, including a dizzying dose of Valium. We see Dion only in unvarnished moments, vacuuming or playing sports or video games with her children, and often in desperate calm, battling a condition in which her muscles literally rebel against her brain. “It pains me to show you this,” she says at one point, visibly struggling on camera. Later, the camera fixes on a terrifying seizure Dion experiences after trying to record music again (her voice is now no longer the mezzo-soprano, piercing and blaring, that it once was, but instead a high-pitched shell of old).

“I Am: Celine Dion” hardly looks back, waiting until well into the film’s less-than-two-hour running time to show archival footage from her childhood and the early days of her career on television and later in the arena, reminding us that she didn’t create or invent herself; rather, she is simply the person she has always been, not some persona conjured up for the stage or screen. Dion’s flippant sense of humor remains intact here, as she is as willing to laugh at herself and her condition as she is at the circumstances around her. At times, you long for the context of what her family says — she has 13 siblings! — but are reminded of the power of documentary in moving beyond such platitudes. Not since Asif Kapadia’s “Amy” has a documentary looked so closely, and with so few inhibitions, at a singer/songwriter who became an icon through a spotlight that ultimately also obscured her.

To explain her condition and the uncertainty she feels in the face of her fans’ disappointment, Dion uses the metaphor of an apple tree: “People line up and I give them apples… I polish them and they all go home with a basket of apples. My branches sometimes start to fall off, they get crooked and those branches start to bear fewer apples. But there are still just as many people in line. I don’t want them to have to line up if I don’t have any apples for them.”

But one fan reminded her that “we’re not here for the apples; we’re here for the tree.” And indeed, “I Am: Celine Dion” regales us with plenty of footage of Dion’s ballad-waving, even as she reveals that in past moments when she may have shaken the microphone in a soundcheck gesture or faked a cough, she was battling extreme pain in her body, due to a then-unknown illness battling within her.

Dion takes part in Taylor’s extraordinarily intimate and revealing documentary, often in a disheveled state, or at least without makeup or jewelry from the many beautiful dresses she keeps in a warehouse, and looks back with radiant nostalgia. But she never feels sorry for herself or lapses into self-pity, insisting that she will, damn it, crawl back to the stage if she has to.

A scene in which Dion suffers a body-stopping seizure, curled up on a table as her caregivers rush to her aid, is excruciating to watch. But you sense that Dion wanted to include this moment intentionally, not only to shine a light on her illness and perhaps destigmatize any disability that threatens a person, creative or not, but also to remind us of the flawed woman behind the voice that was always there anyway. She was never anyone but herself, and this film lets that self shine through in a way that seems rare for a documentary about an artist.

Grade: B+

“I Am: Celine Dion” premieres on Prime Video on Tuesday, June 25.