I guess this can sort of double as a mini-review of Kylie Minogue’s new album, X, since I’m still not really up to writing about the music I’m listening to as much as I’d like to. I listened to the new album this past weekend and loved it – and not just for the reason I expected to love it, which is that Karen Poole, Shelly’s sister, ex-Alisha’s Attic, wrote a few songs on it.

From the first post credits shot here – of Kylie looking, well, normal for the first time, to me, in ages – this documentary really pulled me in. I used to be a massive fan of Kylie. She’s one of the celebrities I could count on the fingers of one hand who I’ve been so obsessed with when I was little that I literally covered walls with the tiniest magazine cuttings related to her. Those little shots here where she’s completely unhindered by the publicity, the make-up, the image of herself, they reminded me of that love I used to have for her. It’s in those moments that the subtitle “A Personal Portrait” strays far from the lie I thought the film makers could easily get away with considering the name. It reminded me very much of the Molly Dineen documentary about Geri Halliwell ... except – and here’s where the negative starts – I hate to say it, but outside of these fleeting glimpses it ultimately doesn’t get anywhere near as close as it clearly wants to.

The problem I have with “the new” Kylie, that is to say, pretty-much post-Eighties and Neighbours and Stock, Aitken, Waterman (actually, having written that I now realise how much that Kylie fits what I’m about to say too …) – and the problem I have with the album (though I wouldn’t call it a problem since, like I said, I love the album) – is that she’s almost literally become nothing more than a puppet for other people’s concerns.

There’s a moment here where we see her in concert doing Madonna’s “Vogue”; it closes with her as Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”. Midway you see her giving Christmas presents to sick kids with “Santa Claus” and it appears to them (and the intercut black and white interview shows her pretty much agreeing) that she might as well be the fairy on the Christmas Tree so much does she continue the democratic, impersonal, careful performance – even when offstage. In one scene she’s unable to do anything onstage because the whole concert is being controlled by “two superhuman computers,” we hear, which have gone awry. She’s tellingly credited as “The Showgirl” in the end credits, as if the whole film had been some kind of a fiction. I was amazed while checking the credits of the film on the IMDb that the director, William Baker, is apparently a close friend of Kylie’s – so much does he seem … to me, at least … to be always indirectly commenting on ‘what’s wrong with this picture’, not just with Kylie but with the Whole Fame Thing. I guess he’s just the really good kind of friend that actually points things like that out.

Like I said, the album X is fantastic – but it’s got nothing to do with Kylie. It’s a songwriters’ and producers’ showcase, and the characters of Karen Poole, Guy Chambers, Cathy Dennis, etc, even the ghost of Serge Gainsbourg, come through 1000 times more than anything the mere image of Kylie on the cover has to offer. What the man behind the camera says at the start of “White Diamond” really turns out to be all too succinct – “They think Neighbours + Michael Hutchence + gold hot pants + cancer = Kylie, and you’re scared to let them any closer,” to which her response is a faux-cool, “Right! 10 points.” The scariest thing to me is that perhaps the real reason she’s scared is that there’s literally nothing beyond that crude equation.

There are glimpses here of a normal girl screaming to be herself, and those for me make it well worth the look – it’s the little things, head in hands over a meal for one, dancing down the hall to the stage, asking the cameraman if the thing on her head looks ridiculous, giggling over Photobooth on her MacBook (“Hours of entertainment”), her too-cute warm-up routine, messing around on the beach with 2 random younger fans – but in the end it’s an immensely sad portrait, even sadder than Geri was all alone in that big house.

I don’t know, I could be just reading too much of myself into her, which I guess is the appeal of such impersonality in celebrity, we all see something of ourselves in someone like Kylie. “So much to say, and I just don’t know how to say it,” she says at the point that moved me the most. The film has beautiful moments like that, no question. It’s the way it makes you realise how much personality is burned away to make these big faceless Vegas-style productions, these megastars. I kinda knew it already … but to see it happening before your eyes is almost too much. The weird part for me is when they bring in Bono of all people – and he makes Kylie’s performance look positively humble by his playing to the camera – and then they unite onstage to sing “Kids”, and all doubt collapses under you as you just can’t help warming to them both even despite having had the whole thing deconstructed before your face just seconds previously.

I guess, if nothing else, it’s some kind of masterclass in fame. The biggest question it asks is how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice? And it’s a question that’s been asked plenty before – but to those of us who care, it really can’t be asked enough. There’s another moment where she sings about, “living the dream,” and she shouts, “this is one of my dreams,” all dolled up in a sparkling red dress to a cheering crowd, and again, it’s presented in such a questioning way that all you can think is: if there’s a reason to hold her up and congratulate her, it’s ‘cos she’s living that soul-destroying dream so nobody else has to.

As I’ve said before, when a film makes me babble this much it can’t possibly be bad. But this one’s too sad to come back to in a hurry, it fails to get close to its subject, and I find it slightly bizarre how little it touched on her fight against cancer.