SXSW Online 2021 - Film Review - Demi Lovato: Dancing With The Devil (2021)

There seems to have been quite a glut of documentaries chronicling the lives of musicians and pop stars in the last year delving into careers, upbringings, successes, failures, and, of course, those things that happen behind closed doors which have yet to be revealed. In this era of social media saturation and almost literally “following” your favourite famous people, we feel closer to them as they post pictures, opinions, jokes, and what their world – at least in part – looks like but with that comes people’s thirst for more: for deeper things, for the private to become public and, in some cases, to provoke debate and discussions that take on a life of their own. We feel closer to them than ever as fans but, by extension, this allows the media world to create narratives that aren’t always what they appear, especially when those stars are suffering in ways we didn’t know about.

Demi Lovato is one such artist who has had most of her private life painted onto the biggest canvases imaginable, put up in lights for all to see as she navigated fame, childhood traumas, and celebrity that pushed her, in her own words, into addiction. “I’m on my 9th life” she states in Dancing With The Devil, a new four-part documentary charting her much-publicised drug overdose in July 2018 that, but for a ten-minute period where doctors and nurses worked miracles, would have seen her die. But she didn’t, clinging on after multiple strokes, a heart attack, being ed legally blind, and having most of her blood transfused, she has still come back to some semblance of normality, albeit skewed.

This isn’t the first Lovato documentary we have seen thus far – 2017’s Simply Complicated told more of her career while a 2018 effort that was to showcase her latest tour was scrapped after her overdose, with some of the surviving footage incorporated here to reflect a more rounded picture of events. Here, in Michael D. Ratner’s raw behind-the-scenes look at pre and post overdose and how it has affected both her and those closest to her, we get to uncover the bigger picture on her , rather than those produced by gossip columns and celebrity tabloids, where she openly discusses everything, from touring, fame, writing and all of her demons, big and small.

But what is true all of three is just how much Lovato has suffered through her short life, the dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight very reflective of how she has come to the brink of oblivion but managed to step back just in time. She is a tortured but earnest soul who has been scarred in so many different ways but uses this as her platform to not just set the record straight but to take some of the burden away by openly and honestly talking about her demons, no matter who she might upset. And with her and many other talking heads – from her best friends, family, personal assistants, managers, and more – we get a no-holds-barred of not just that summer but the months leading up to it and beyond, which twisted again last year when Lovato got engaged during the quarantine.

Just like some of her best songs – her 2020 Grammys performance of “Anyone” is arguably her most personal – this is an earnest, thoughtful, truthful, and ultimately rewarding peek behind the curtain and deep into what has been a turbulent time in Lovato’s life and she deserves so much praise for laying herself bare in front of the cameras as the catharsis can only help her plight. Could it have gone deeper still? Will she ever truly break free? Those are the lingering questions but only she can know the answer to the second one. As for the film, there are still some moments that stay under wraps but something has to be left private. If only things stayed that way.