‘P!nk: All I Know So Far’ review: shallow but watchable pop star tour diary

NME

This documentary follows Pink on the European leg of her enormously successful ‘Beautiful Trauma World Tour’. It’s summer 2019 and the singer is playing stadiums for the first time, including a couple of milestone shows at Wembley. Early in the film, a dancer makes her laugh during a choreo run-through and Pink deadpans: “You’d get fired for that in a Madonna rehearsal.” It’s an amusing moment that captures Pink’s natural warmth and obvious rapport with her crew. Sadly, it also unwittingly highlights the fact that this film never reaches the riveting heights of Madonna: Truth or Dare, Alex Keshishian’s landmark 1991 doc tracking the Queen of Pop on tour.

Directed by The Greatest Showman‘s Michael Gracey, the film does offer a reasonably intimate insight into how Pink balances work and family life. “Some people walk out the door and go to work and they leave what’s at home at home and go and do their job,” she says in an early scene. “I don’t walk out of a door – ever. Everything is melded into one and that is both beautiful and incredibly overwhelming.” What comes across, though, is Pink’s remarkable ability to keep a level head as she travels from hotel room to stadium to yet another hotel room. Helped immeasurably by her husband Carey Hart, a retired pro motorcyclist who joins her on tour, she finds time to show their kids the local sights and have a post-show debrief over wine with her manager. It’s an incredibly impressive bit of plate-spinning.

Though Pink speaks briefly about being affected as a kid by her parents’ divorce, which she sang about on the 2002 single ‘Family Portrait’, Gracey doesn’t dig deep into her psyche. There’s barely a mention of her real name – Alecia Moore – and not even a cursory recap of her career arc. Pink has never been the hottest pop star on the planet, but she has steadily built a reputation as a formidable live performer and reliable hitmaker since 2001’s ‘Missundaztood’ album, on which she boldly swapped glossy R&B for confessional pop-rock. Instead, Gracey is content to allow Pink to sing the praises of her husband and band – sweet, but not massively interesting – while we watch her fixing minor flaws in her show. At times, the backstage footage is almost comically clichéd: no pop fan ever needs to see a pre-show prayer circle ever again. Thankfully, the live performances are more exciting, and a rehearsal scene in which Pink flies over an empty Wembley Stadium on a zip wire is genuinely breathtaking.

The result is a shallow but watchable portrait of an uncommonly well-adjusted superstar. You’ll come away with plenty of respect for Pink as a performer, mother and businesswoman, but you won’t feel as though you’ve really seen what makes her tick.

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