Critics reviews

In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity. One part of Madonna's genius has consistently been the creation (and reinvention) of her persona. Rather than purporting to give an unvarnished look at the woman beneath the bustier, the Alek Keshishian film calls into question the very idea of a consistent identity.

For this Gen X critic, the experience of revisiting Truth or Dare for the first time since its initial release prompted a flood of memories about Madonna's enormous influence on American culture, and, by extension, on my life: Nearly every conversation (public or private), academic essay, and broadsheet op-ed about race, gender, and/or sexuality from roughly the mid-Eighties through the mid-Nineties inevitably involved the Material Girl.

To say that I wasn't a big Madonna fan in 1991 would be an understatement—at the time, she seemed to me the epitome of soulless, machine-tooled superstardom... Now, I look at this beautifully photographed doc (more nostalgia) and see a fascinating young woman who's working her ass off while struggling to find the most potentially rewarding balance between candor and control.

Certainly the film shows enough footage of Madonna's "unflattering" side, and concert footage is spare enough to narrowly avoid the generic pigeonhole of the "Rocumentary." However one must still consider that the primary purpose of the film's release is to make money-after all this is not made for the Margaret Mead Film Festival — hence the proselytizing of the Madonna myth is seen here as a process of concealment through transferal and mystification.

To my surprise, I found myself enjoying the offstage Madonna much more than the concert Madonna, largely because the material is much fresher. The numbers onstage suffer from being twice dismantled and reassembled: music videos that are "re-created" on the stage are splintered again by director Alek Keshishian's music-video strategies; the effect is not to bring them back to square one but to serve up a third-generation spin-off.