“When people fall out of love with you, there’s nothing you can do to make them change their minds,” she says, though that cold shoulder from the Grammys and an increasingly hostile wave of social-media takedowns have Swift on edge. At first, she takes it all quite personally, but after concluding a court battle with a radio personality who groped her, Swift starts to realize that so many of the issues she’s been facing alone are actually institutional problems that affect women everywhere.

It’s here that things start to click for both Swift and “Miss Americana.” She admits that constant paparazzi attention and pictorial scrutiny have contributed to an eating disorder she still tries to keep at bay: “It’s better to think you look fat,” Swift says, “than to look sick.” She also begins to question facets of her eager-to-please personality: Are women taught to seek approval at an early age, and has that held her back in ways that a man would simply brush off?

And then, to the horror of her management team, she begins to wade into politics.

Swift is furious when Marsha Blackburn, a Republican she describes as “Trump in a wig,” becomes the favorite for a U.S. Senate seat in Swift’s home state of Tennessee. Still, the singer had always been careful not to voice her political opinions in public: Having come up in the country-music world, she remembers all too well the backlash that the Dixie Chicks faced in 2003 after lead singer Natalie Maines said she was ashamed of President George W. Bush.

Though Swift’s mother encourages her to publicly endorse Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, other members of Swift’s management team beseech her to stay out of it, fearing she could lose half her fan base by criticizing Republicans. And what if President Trump goes after her, they ask? Swift reacts to that idea with a defiant expletive, takes to the internet with her endorsement, and decides she’ll never stay quiet about the things that matter again.

While Swift’s political journey gets plenty of airtime in “Miss Americana,” some major things are still left out of the documentary: A continuing battle over the rights to her old music with the music manager and entrepreneur Scooter Braun is never touched upon, Swift’s actor-boyfriend Joe Alwyn is glimpsed only once in a backstage embrace, and her participation in the movie “Cats” is ignored entirely.

Still, Swift’s late-blooming mission to question authority and “deprogram the misogyny in my brain” is compelling. “I want to wear pink and tell you how I feel about politics,” she eventually asserts. “And I don’t think those things have to cancel each other out.”