Sometimes it’s hard to remember: Was Madonna really the biggest pop star in the world when her documentary Truth Or Dare was released in the summer of 1991, or was that just the part she played in the movie? Alek Keshishian’s stylish look at the backstage drama attending Madonna’s global Blond Ambition tour arrived at an unusual point in the singer’s evolution, both as an artist and as a public figure. After spending the ’80s courting controversy, Madonna spent the ’90s seeing how much further she could venture into sexual and religious provocation, and whether she could turn the act of provocation itself into a kind of art. In 1992, Madonna unleashed the coffee-table book Sex, full of nudity and references to sadomasochism. And when Truth Or Dare came out, much of the buzz around the movie had to do with Madonna’s casual (albeit brief) nudity, her frank sex talks with her mostly gay dance troupe, and the scene where she fellates an Evian bottle. The aggressively “candid” backstage material—coupled with the snippets of Madonna’s then-boyfriend Warren Beatty chastising her for exposing so much of her private life on-camera—transformed the conversation about Madonna’s edginess into a conversation about how much of that edginess was calculated, and perhaps phony. That became who Madonna was, at least for a few years: controversy in quotation marks.
