Many years in the making, this definitive documentary on political musician MIA is credited to long-time friend Stephen Loveridge. Really it should at least be co-credited to Matangi/Maya Arulpragasam – for one thing, it’s her own footage of her early career and in Sri Lanka, where the film sources its greatest energy. More than that, she’s the controlling spirit of this enjoyable documentary: always the centre of attention, performing and setting the mood with absolute magnetism. It’s clear she’s the director of her own life and Loveridge just happens to occasionally be in the right place at the right time.

The structure of the film is mostly linear and traditional, following MIA from early days as the child of Sri Lankans immigrant in London to present-day fame, controversy and motherhood. But there’s nothing traditional about her – she and her siblings had to be tough and reinvent themselves in the absence of a father who was away as an activist in the Tamil resistance movement. Her music, artwork, fashion and general angry-rave aesthetic appears to have come to her with little effort; she just knew it would work.

MIA: ‘This is a white country, you don’t have to spell it out to me’ Read more

Toughness is a recurring theme. Arulpragasam never takes an easy route, composing her own music and conceptualising her own music videos from the start: leaving a cushy situation as Justine Frischmann’s wing woman to work independently, turning up at XL Recordings to ask them to sign her, and all the ways she annoyed the US press once notorious there. Appearing on American TV heavily pregnant, declaring that there was a genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka at awards ceremonies, and constantly avoiding ducking difficult situations.

The film comes from a place of deep admiration for MIA, but unlike more fawning biographies, it makes a convincing case that this admiration is well earned. Many people will be unaware of the viciousness of the backlash against her by a US media establishment who attempted to portray her as a fake fashionable radical. Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times is caught on camera gushing over her interviewee before condemning her in a lead magazine article. A terrible parody video accuses her of being a champagne socialist. Bill Maher patronises her on his chat show when she tries to explain her concerns. In an aggravating moment, a radio DJ entirely fails to comprehend the message of her ironic video for Born Free, in which red-haired men and children are hunted down and shot in the head.

There’s a key section where Arulpragasam’s frustration with her treatment is summed up in her claim that people want brown celebrities to smile nicely like Aziz Ansari rather than have political opinions and feel like a threat. It’s in these later stages of the film, as her life becomes ever more complex, that Loveridge captures the best original material. While it’s a thrill to see her breezily workshop her tracks early in her career, including a great exploratory version of Paper Planes and a visit to see Afrikan Boy and dance with him, she remains emotionally elusive; it’s the painful times in more recent years are where we really get to know her.

We’re backstage as she’s condemned and sued by the NFL for displaying a middle finger during the super bowl. It’s edge-of-the-seat stuff as she and her team are confused and scared by the fake gravity of the situation. Madonna is no help. Arulpragasam’s son says he doesn’t like the Super Bowl at all and he just wanted to be with his mum, and they have a cuddle. As she’s done since she was a teenager, she shrugs her shoulders, trusts her instincts, and moves on knowing she was in the right. Whilst not the most beautiful looking material, this extended sequence is pacy and well-edited and, like many set pieces in the film, proves a theory suggested almost from the first lines of the film – that this unique pop star always knew she was special and that would annoy people.

The documentary is open-ended, with a mini-conclusion of the family moving back to the UK from the US, but this isn’t a happy ending. It seems MIA will be fighting forever, a one-woman awkward squad whose background, both economically and racially, means she’s not allowed to get too popular. It’s right that for once, in this film, she truly gets to control her own narrative.