Beyoncé’s Craft Is a Well-Oiled Machine. But She, Her New Movie Makes Clear, Is Not.

If you’ve seen Beyoncé perform within the past decade, whether on a televised awards show or in the flesh, then congratulations: You have borne witness to a seamless orchestration of myriad moving parts, a perfect machine that only grows more gargantuan and complex with each new tour. “Spectacle” would be one way to put it, though that suggests that a Beyoncé performance is merely something to look at. “Experience” may be the more accurate term: Beyoncé envelops you in her craft, in her storytelling, in her sheer force of gravity—and, increasingly, since the 2016 “Formation” tour for her acclaimed album Lemonade, in the long-hidden messier inner workings of her life and her art. A decadeslong pursuit of perfection began to shift, in that stage of her career, to breaking down those same barriers of perfection that demarcated her as more idol than human. Now, after spending the past few years chipping away at this facade, the megastar has not just embraced her imperfections, but released a full-scale celebration of them with her latest concert film Renaissance, now playing in theaters.

Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé begins in the same way as the shows from her “Renaissance” tour do, with the songs “Dangerously in Love” and “Flaws and All.” Specifically, the performance of “Flaws and All” that Beyoncé gave in Inglewood, California, on the day of her 42^nd birthday, prefaced by a moving speech about everything she’s thankful for, from her family and fans to “every flaw, every stretchmark, every fupa.” This expression of vulnerability, coming from an artist who, just a decade ago, made headlines for banning professional photographers from her concerts following the publication of apparently not-flattering-enough photos, is perhaps a sign that Beyoncé has gone all in on, as she describes it, “the ability to make lemonade out of lemons,” a loosening of absolute control and a demystification of the icon that began with Lemonade. Granted, everything we see in Renaissance, including the singer’s depiction of her own imperfection, has still been curated by her, but the fact that the film details so many of the lemons she has encountered throughout her life—the resulting lemonade, of course, being the show we are currently witnessing—feels, at the very least, like a sizeable shift in image, and, at the most, gratifying.

Though Beyoncé’s previous concert film, 2019’s Homecoming—which centered her celebration of Blackness at her historic Coachella headlining performance—took the same approach of blending concert and behind-the-scenes footage, and earned praise for highlighting Beyoncé’s dancers and the star’s strict regimen in getting show-ready after having twins, it stopped just short of showing the true extent of manual labor involved in creating the production. A large part of breaking down the idea of Beyoncé is unveiling the workhorse that functions under her name, and the Renaissance film does that by highlighting the nuts and bolts of what the singer describes as the “well-oiled machine” of the tour. She reminds the audience of the huge crew that worked tirelessly for the four-plus years it took to create the show. She dresses her crew members in reflective jumpsuits to showcase the “choreography of what they do.” The work is far from flaw-proof, she reminds us: Half an hour into the film, after she goes long on the fine-tuned technicalities of the production, Beyoncé inserts footage of the moment, during her August performance in Arizona, when the audio unexpectedly cut off. It’s the making-of-lemonade in action: In the scramble to reinstate the audio, her team decides to have her do a costume change, ensuring that every exit and entrance onto the stage, even the unplanned ones, are a moment.

The film’s inclusion of that hitch, which is smartly edited to trick the audience into thinking the movie has cut out for a moment, illustrates a point that Beyoncé states outright later on: She “doesn’t give a fuck” anymore. By now, she has nothing to prove; everything that an artist could possibly achieve in a lifetime, she’s already done. (Save for an eyebrow-raisingly elusive Grammy for Album of the Year, but do not get me started on that.) She says she used to rehearse constantly so that she would be prepared enough to be free on stage, but on this tour, she’s “just free.” That sense of freedom comes through, evident in the countless fan videos of the singer messing up, laughing at her own mistakes, and sharing inside jokes with her fans. Looking back at videos of Beyoncé from early in her career, it was always obvious that she had a personality, but there was a time that she shielded it behind layers of fiercely upheld privacy and careful image calibration. Now, finally, she is in what my friends and I have dubbed a return to her “funny era.”

But Renaissance isn’t only about coming back from, transforming, or chuckling at minor, split-second fumbles on stage. In the behind-the-scenes footage, Beyoncé details her struggles, like suffering, at the age of 13, from a vocal injury that she feared would jeopardize her entire career, or undergoing knee surgery shortly before rehearsing for this show. She even shows herself reuniting with the other members of Destiny’s Child for, she explains, the first time ever—a reunion that included the two members whose exit from the group, before it became the trio many recognize it as today, was the subject of a lawsuit that settled out of court in 2002—alluding to the tumultuous and notably hush-hush history of the group’s many iterations.

Beyoncé’s most touching display of vulnerability, however, concerns motherhood. Though the show is a well-oiled machine, Beyoncé states in the film that she is not; she’s a human who struggles to balance her work with motherhood, because, as demanding as her work is, her primary job is to be a present and involved mother. “Kids don’t care what you do for a living, they just want their mom,” she says. Admittedly, it’s in the portrayal of Beyoncé’s struggle balancing motherhood and work that the film indulges too much in the classic hagiography present in most concert films: Beyoncé says she still takes her kids to school, but doesn’t quite seem to realize how out of touch it may come across as to mention in the same breath how she would fly to Cannes to join her children in a luxurious French home for the second half of her tour. And, of course, there’s no mention of the help she can afford—the nannies for her children, the best physical therapists that can travel with her to monitor her knee rehab, all the other unseen labor that goes into facilitating her quest to have it all.

Nevertheless, Beyoncé’s story of motherhood is still compelling—nowhere more than in the part of the film that focuses on Blue Ivy, Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 11-year-old daughter, who became something of a sensation this summer after dancing during the “My Power”/”Black Parade” medley, first at Beyoncé’s Paris show on May 26, and then subsequently at various stops. In a rare moment of vulnerability, mother and daughter share how Blue Ivy faced criticism on social media over her first performance. With more clarity than many celebrity parents seem to possess, Beyoncé explains that she was hesitant to let her child go on stage because Blue Ivy hasn’t been through the obstacles that Beyoncé has, which, difficult as they were, prepared her to be the performer she is today. But, by honoring her child’s desire to join her on the main stage—a child who has been criticized online since her birth for no real reason other than having famous parents—Beyoncé obliterated a cycle of idealized perfection: All Blue Ivy had to do was take the leap, face the criticism, and work hard to overcome her challenges, rather than become paralyzed by the unattainability of perfection.

The film, as made explicit by Beyoncé’s opening speech, is built on the idea of exalting that which makes us human, whether it’s our flaws, our vulnerabilities, or our identity. It’s a meditation on time, aging, and motherhood. Watching it in the darkness of the cinema, surrounded by the palpable joys and heartbreaks of my fellow theatergoers, I teared up at the film’s touching remembrance of Beyoncé’s Uncle Johnny, a close friend of her mother’s, whose influence on Beyoncé’s life—as a Black, Southern, gay man—before he passed serves as the inspiration for this album. Life and death are two sides of the same coin; in embracing what it means to be mortal—and, by extension, human and imperfect—Beyoncé found a way, in this Renaissance era of hers, to celebrate life and liberation. She does it in a way that only a Beyoncé who has stepped down to earth from her pedestal after more than 20 years finally can.