Make no mistake: Shields is a fascinating constituent. Perhaps no single person has embodied the Madonna-whore complex in American pop culture as thoroughly as she. When she was 15, she shot Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon, a story about two teens stuck together on an island. “They wanted to make it a reality show,” recalls Shields of what would become a massive hit. “They wanted to sell my actual sexual awakening.” But, she points out, “The irony was, I wasn’t in touch with any of my own sexuality.” In fact, in her 1985 book On Your Own, she revealed that she was a virgin, creating another avenue for the press’s obsession. If they couldn’t get enough of her invented sexuality, that it was nonexistent put the media in overdrive.

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There’s perhaps even more irony that the two-hour-plus doc fixates on Shields’ sexuality and love life (losing her virginity to Dean Cain, her marriage to Andre Agassi, and Michael Jackson lying about dating her are all covered). You get the sense that her sexualized image is one that she’ll never escape, that all she can settle for is perspective on it. She also opens up about being raped—it occurred after she graduated from Princeton and tried to get her career back on track. She says she met with an unnamed filmmaker and went back to his hotel room, where he disrobed and jumped on her. “It was like wrestling,” she says. She discusses her mental calculus during the time, fearing he would grab her if she attempted to run out. So she froze, prioritizing staying alive and getting out.

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“God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I practiced that,” she says, threading the needle of the doc’s focus. Her comment, coming when it does, provides a subtle and devastating call back to her description of learning to compartmentalize in her youth.

Recently shot fly-on-the-wall scenes of Shields’ life are sprinkled in, and none is more effective than one of the doc’s final scenes, when she discusses her work with her teenage daughters, Rowan Francis and Grier Hammond. When one mentions hearing about Pretty Baby on TikTok and not wanting to watch it, Shields attempts to contextualize: “It was a true story about something that happened in the early 1900s. So to depict that now would not be [permissible].” She tells her daughters that she’s “nude twice” in the movie, which one labels “weird.”

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“What’s weird about that?” asks Shields. “It’s called child pornography…technically,” answers Rowan Francis. In what reads like consolation, Grier Hammond offers, “You were 11, you weren’t mature enough to be making your own decisions.”

And then, perhaps the most telling moment of the entire documentary: Rowan Francis asks if her mother would have allowed her daughters to appear in such a movie at age 11. Her mother’s answer? A simple, resounding, “No.”