Tribeca Film Review: Let the Canary Sing

Cyndi Lauper in new biodoc Let the Canary Sing (Image Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment)

There's an alternate world in which Cyndi Lauper was the biggest pop star of the last four decades. Yet oddly, as biodoc Let the Canary Sing suggests, that would have been a much more boring outcome.

Produced by Fine Point Films (and with London-based Dogwoof handling international sales), the fact that Let the Canary Sing is financed by Sony Music Entertainment might raise a red flag. After all, that it's the company behind the labels that released almost all her solo albums (since and including 1983's breakout She's So Unusual) suggests that this may be a soft-focus, greatest hits package.

But what's fascinating is that the "household name section" of Lauper's life and career is arguably of least interest to director Alison Ellwood. Having established her reputation as Alex Gibney's go-to editor for political exposes like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and My Trip to Al-Qaeda, as a director she's already explored revolutionary musical careers in The Go-Gos, History of the Eagles, and 2020 SXSW selection and scene history Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time. Concentrating on Lauper's greatest commercial successes – the 10-year run of She's So Unusual, True Colors (1986), A Night to Remember (1989), and Hat Full of Stars – or on her deliberately eclectic later career choices, from 2003 jazz cover album At Last to 2008 Grammy-nominated dance album Bring Ya to the Brink, would just be recapping her Discogs listing.

Ellwood, working with Lauper and her family, instead wants to find out how she became who she is – a resolutely self-assured and unique artist. So while Let the Canary Sing is undoubtedly a loving portrait of Lauper, it's also a very human portrait of a woman who has always been OK with walking away, or dusting herself down after personal and professional challenges.

That personal growth can only be shown by looking at the years before that hard-won self-awareness, and exactly why she wasn't interested in churning out True Colors for the fifth time. It's in looking at her childhood in Brooklyn, then moving to Queens where she acquired that distinctive accent that she spent years trying to hide. It's in putting together the pieces that lead to her being such a resolute ally to the LGBTQIA+ community when it was either a career-killer or often a little performative. It's about how she worked out that being a Janis Joplin soundalike (Lauper pays more tribute to voice coach Katie Agresta than any musical influence) would be a career-ending decision.

And it's also, subtly, about how the almost-cliched story of how her overnight success took years. It's not just in the music (could a teen really evoke the world-weary defeated cynicism required of "Money Changes Everything"?), or the time developing all those vocal idiosyncrasies and unlocking that four-octave range, but in having weathered so many storms by the time fame came that she knew how fickle and irrelevant it is. Even the title of the film is taken from an extraordinary court ruling that was the dawn after one of those storms. And after all those tempests, what Ellwood shows is that Lauper wasn't eroded by them, or calloused, but instead revealed.

So while Let the Canary Sing may be a sympathetic portrait, maybe that's more than OK because it's never sycophantic. There may not be any exposé or surprise revelations, and Ellwood is deeply respectful of the areas of her home life that Lauper wants to keep private, but at the end of the day it's a reminder that she remains one of the most likable, honest, and true-to-herself artists of her era.

Let the Canary Sing screened as part of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, and will be released later this year.