Miss Americana is a tricky movie. The film, which was one of the opening-night selections at this year’s Sundance Film Festival ahead of its Netflix release on January 31, is an often compelling look at the psychological mechanics governing one Taylor Swift—mega-famous singer-songwriter and frequent lightning rod for all kinds of disparate controversy. In trying to explicate the unique surreality of her situation, Swift makes for a fascinating documentary subject, both generous and withholding, frank and elusive. Lana Wilson’s film chases closely behind Swift as she leads the audience toward various laments and realizations; it’s as much a visual diary as anything else.

A diary, of course, is comprised of the chosen, curated truths of its author. Technically, Taylor Swift did not make Miss Americana. But her stamp is all over it, in its selective elisions and its careful structuring of a new celebrity identity. In that way, Miss Americana often plays as an intimately articulated press release, a bit of star-burnishing propaganda that is totally self-serving, if never malevolent.

Swift has probably earned the prerogative to manage her image in this long format. Hers is the heart, mind, and body that has been offered up to the masses for adulation and relentless scrutiny for many years now. Why shouldn’t she then get to assert some further agency and tell her story the way she thinks is most fair? We have given her our attention, and now she is asking us to hear, really hear, what she has to say—and, in the process, maybe learn who she really is.

I like the idea of that project, just as I quite like Swift’s music, the way it mixes confession with broader, more accessible sentiment. I have not followed the ins and outs of Swift’s much-covered personal life the way some people have, but I’ve always enjoyed the musical fruit born of that tumult. It’s been an interesting ride, watching (and listening to) Swift as she’s navigated her bumpy, glorious adolescence all the way to 30, where she’s just found herself.

Only, something cynical crept into my head while watching Miss Americana. It was an apprehension about just how managed this whole thing is, how precise it is in its mythology. Given the buzzy context of Sundance, with a lauded young documentarian bringing us the gospel of Swift on the first night of the festival, I’m left wondering if we should expect something more from the film—if its truths mean all that much when they’ve been so thoroughly vetted, arranged just so to bend a narrative in directions favorable to its subject.

Miss Americana sometimes feels like a snow job, like we are being hoodwinked into buying an idea with nothing to balance it against. The film captures some private moments that actually aren’t all that private, considering there was a camera there; it’s hard not to feel a growing suspicion that this is all for show. Not that the film is insincere, exactly, but it is at the very least shrewdly timed, its gradual epiphanies meted out to help shape Swift’s latest consumable iteration of self.

In the movie, Swift persuasively ruminates on the impossibly constant demand that female stars be ever evolving lest they risk obsolescence. I take her point. And I don’t begrudge Swift wanting to change, nor her wanting us to know that she has. But when this film’s arc is predicated so specifically on a dawning political conscience—we watch as, in 2018, Swift endorses candidates and alludes to a broader political ethos for the first time in her nearly two-decade career—one has to interrogate just what those politics are, and what their now public function really is. What were Swift’s ethics before the cameras descended (at her beckoning) to detail her coming out? How did they manifest in her unilluminated life, before the light showed up?