Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me (2022)

Alek Keshishian's Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is a music documentary that declines the usual victory lap. It follows Gomez across six years, through lupus, bipolar disorder, and the grinding machinery of pop stardom. Her Mexican-American heritage is present but never becomes the film's organizing principle. There is no LGBTQ thread, no climate sermon, no racial reckoning. The camera stays close to one woman's exhaustion. That narrowness is the film's limitation and its quiet strength.

The feminist dimension is mild. Gomez is a female superstar under enormous pressure, yet the film does not build an argument about patriarchy. It notices the cost of fame and lets the occasional sigh stand in for a critique of capital. This is not an eat-the-rich tract. It is a diaristic shrug at the celebrity machine, which is a different animal. Body positivity never enters the frame. The documentary has other concerns, and it pursues them with a stubborn intimacy.

Where the film earns its keep is in its treatment of neurodivergence. Gomez's bipolar diagnosis is not a footnote. It is the spine of the project. She talks about medication, psychosis, self-harm, and the daily labor of staying alive in public. The advocacy is real but soft-pedaled. This is not a lecture. It is a confession with a release date. The result is moving without being preachy, and that restraint keeps the whole thing from collapsing into a public service announcement. Keshishian understands that an unflattering close-up can do more work than a thesis. The film never rewrites history or mounts a political campaign. It simply sits with a famous person while she struggles, and finds something honest in the mess.