“She deserves better” was the first thought that crossed my mind as the credits rolled on Let the Canary Sing, Alison Ellwood’s documentary on the life and career of the pop star Cyndi Lauper. Lauper, who became an instant icon of 80s youth with the release of her album She’s So Unusual (which featured songs like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”and “She Bop”that became feminist anthems) and her punk aesthetic (from her eccentric, pieced-together wardrobe to her candy-coated hair-dos), has always been unapologetically unique. Ellwood’s (who also directed a doc about another 80s girl group, 2020’s The Go-Go’s) film about her is, in comparison, almost painfully conventional.
Let the Canary Sing—so named for a judge’s proclamation after Lauper won a court case to break from her old manager in the early 80s—does start off on strong footing, however, with Lauper’s bold personality on display from the outset. We see her, in the present day, sitting in the back of a car in endless New York City traffic, asking the driver in her immediately recognizable Brooklyn accent—when he informs her of their estimated arrival time—if he can make that any faster. Lauper herself is heavily involved in the documentary; she’s filmed sitting on a couch, offering up recollections of her childhood growing up in Queens, her early music career, and her creative process. The film spends a surprising amount of time on the pre-fame portion of Lauper’s life, from her childhood spent watching the TV show Queen for a Day and listening to the Beatles with her older sister Ellen, to leaving home to live with Ellen as a teenager to escape her abusive stepfather. In between working odd jobs she became the lead singer of a band called Blue Angel. The archival footage of Lauper performing provides the film with much-needed jolts of energy throughout, but it’s especially effective here, watching a pre-fame Lauper belting out the single “I’m Going to Be Strong,” her explosive four-octave range as yet undiscovered by the masses, but her stage presence as beguiling as ever. A select few other family members and colleagues bring their own remembrances of this time to the table, including Ellen and David Wolff, who became Lauper’s manager after they started dating (they fondly recall their first meeting, after which Wolff won her over by helping her carry all her equipment all the way up to her top-floor apartment and proclaiming, “How do I love thee? Let me count the stairs…”).
Let the Canary Sing is at its most fascinating when it delves into the actual creation of some of Lauper’s hit tracks, revealing how, as both a singer and songwriter, she was so involved in engineering her sound, her image (as in the music video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz), and the messages she was promoting through her music. That goes for marketing too; Lauper refused to release “Time After Time” as her first single off the album, smartly remembering a group called The Motels that sank fast after they released a ballad first. We learn how she and her collaborators, for instance, rearranged the originally misogynistic tune written by Robert Hazard into a song about women finding joy in their freedom. We hear about how her 1986 song “True Colors,” off her second album, spoke to the LGBTQ+ community (her sister Ellen was openly gay and Lauper grew up around a supportive group of gay men, fueling her future activism on allyship on their behalf). But, although she didn’t stop working, Lauper’s fame sort of trickled off after that, and the documentary, which is pretty meticulous in its first half, struggles with pacing in its second. It glides over the 90s and early aughts before touching on the next stage of Lauper’s career, her award-winning turn as a Broadway composer for the musical Kinky Boots, and providing a peek into her process composing her next show, an upcoming Broadway adaptation of the 1988 Mike Nichols movie Working Girl, looking for that specifically 80s sound that only she can create.
Let the Canary Sing is, as is the case with many bio-docs that have to cram full lives and careers into an under-two hour running time, slight but serviceable, and, as is the case with many bio-docs in which the subject themselves is heavily relied on as a source, perhaps overly laudatory. To be fair, Lauper is the rare major pop star whose life is largely devoid of controversy; she’s been married to the same man for over 30 years, and her professional and personal break-ups by all accounts seem to have been amicable. She doesn’t struggle with substance abuse, although she admits to being a rather wild teenager when she was still living at home. She’s a vocal advocate for women and LGBTQ+ rights. But by boiling her story down to the basics, Let the Canary Sing fails to portray how Lauper’s unique voice and style fit in to the 80s—the decade where an iconoclastic pop star like Madonna could give Lauper a run for her money—with any sort of rich detail or nuance. It’s peak “just fine” cinema, providing Lauper fans and those viewers who don’t know too much about her enough to chew on while utterly lacking the staying power of her catchiest tunes.
Let the Canary Sing had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival on June 14. Runtime: 96 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 