Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Demi Lovato: Dancing With The Devil’ on YouTube, Where The Pop Star Gets Real About Her OD And Recovery

In Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil (YouTube), the singer and songwriter reveals how the pressures of career, sobriety, and managing her mental health pushed her to relapse with drugs and booze until an overdose nearly killed her. It’s not the story Lovato meant to tell, but it’s one she knows is important to be heard.

DEMI LOVATO: DANCING WITH THE DEVIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The first episode of Demi Lovato’s four-part docuseries — directed and produced by Michael D. Ratner — Mediaopens with an aerial shot quite unable to encompass the vast crowd gathered in Lisbon, Portugal for Lovato’s 2018 performance at the Rock in Rio music festival. Quick cuts then capture her and her band bringing their hands together before her vamp to the massive floodlit stage and a full-throated performance of “Sorry Not Sorry,” the lead single from 2017’s Tell Me You Love Me.

The Gist: The footage that captures the Rock In Rio performance comes from a now-mothballed documentary that followed singer and songwriter Demi Lovato, her band, her dancers, and her support team on the 2018 world tour to support Tell Me You Love Me. Why was it mothballed? As Lovato changes into each resplendent new costume, and her support staff jogs alongside her backstage golf cart like secret service agents escorting a dignitary, and a dancer crouches in a compartment beneath the stage that soon launches him into the air beside her as she belts out “Sorry,” we hear Lovato’s mother Dianna De La Garza on the phone, telling her daughter that it’s the best work she’s ever done. And meanwhile, a subtitle informs us the conversation is taking place just one month before her drug overdose. The story Lovato meant to tell — that of a confident, powerful pop star at the top of her game taking the world by storm — was shelved out of necessity when tragedy struck. Dancing With The Devil picks up that narrative, but puts it at a place much closer to Lovato’s true heart.

“Losing Control,” the pilot episode of Dancing With The Devil, hews much closer to cautionary tale than anything resembling pop star glitz. It plays unused footage from the 2018 doc off seated, candid interviews in 2020 with Lovato, her family, friends, and team members, after the star’s recovery from the July 2018 overdose that caused a heart attack and three strokes. Lovato delves into her childhood trauma stemming from the death of her estranged father, an addict and schizophrenic who physically abused her mother, as well as her mom’s struggle with an addiction to pain pills. And she describes a youth spent in navigation of triggering moments. “Then I was put in beauty pageants where it’s extremely competitive, and it’s all about your looks and your talent,” Lovato explains. “My self-esteem was just completely damaged.” And a supercut of Lovato’s career as a child actor follows, the outsized whimsy of appearances on Barney and Disney Channel ricocheting off the contemporary revelations about Lovato’s tenuous mental state. It’s sobering stuff, and the precursor for the fallout of 2018.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, the young singer and songwriter shared Lovato’s view of fans being like family. You never want to let them down, but the pressure that puts on your ability to live and work in a healthy way is substantial, and often stifling. And though it takes a different tack, the 2020 Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics features a wealth of interviews with music and film world luminaries (Ad-Rock, Natasha Lyonne, and, sadly, Anthony Bourdain) about the intersection of drug use and mental health.

Our Take: Dancing With the Devil derives a lot of tension from interplaying the breathless sensationalism that tinged the media’s coverage of Demi Lovato’s 2018 overdose with the meaningful frowns on the faces of her family, friends, and support staff. There’s a sense that the weight of what was at stake — Lovato’s public persona and music career, the performances on her lengthy world tour, the expectations of her fans, and management’s moves to keep her in line — obscured how much anyone could see what was really up until it was (almost) too late. For example, Lovato’s sister Dallas De La Garza describes how the industry wanted her to live up to her icon status, and her fans’ reaction to her music as empowering, even if Demi herself never asked for that. What Devil doesn’t do in all of this sifting through the recent past is ask what Lovato wanted from her career and public life in the first place. The doc’s emphasis on rationalizing and apologizing leaves little room for a deeper dive into what really makes Demi Lovato tick.

That said, Dancing With the Devil is starkly honest in its aims for advocacy. Its premiere episode begins and ends with messages offering support, encouragement, and contact information for anyone struggling with mental health issues or eating disorders. And it features some quietly powerful footage of Lovato performing her song “Sober” on solo piano in 2018, only months before her relapse and overdose. That it doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of sobriety sends an admirable message, and a poignant one from the perspective of songwriting grist. And that’s undoubtedly the focus of Lovato’s seventh studio full-length Dancing with the Devil…The Art of Starting Over, set to drop March 26th in the immediate wake of the docuseries. Despite setbacks, despite adversity, despite cheating death, we move on, and find a way to love ourselves.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: In its final moments “Losing Control” returns to July 2018, and the hours surrounding Lovato’s eventual overdose. Cell phone photos capture her wilding out before she herself describes how, by the early morning of the 24th, she’d called her dealer. And the audio of her friend’s desperate paramedic radio call plays as Dancing With The Devil fades to a public service message. “It’s OK to ask for help.”

Sleeper Star: Lovato’s friends, confidants, and collaborators Sirah and Matthew Montgomery make numerous appearances in Devil, mostly with a mind to detail or even rationalize the factors at work in their BFF’s breakdown. “If your life is set up to be focused on how you’re not well, then you’re not gonna feel well,” Sirah says of the apparatus designed to uphold Lovato’s dietary and sobriety requirements. “Whatever we’re trying to control or be afraid of will end up happening if that’s our only focus.” And Montgomery frames his friend’s descent into drugs and booze as a kind of personal reclamation. “I think the choice that she made was for agency for herself, but it was also a major act of rebellion. ‘You’re gonna tell me what I can and can’t do for six-plus years? Watch me.'”

Most Pilot-y Line: “Anytime you suppress a part of yourself, it’s going to overflow at some point…I crossed a line that I had never crossed in the world of addiction…” Speaking in 2020, Lovato is fluent in the language of recovery.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dancing With the Devil puts the pressure cooker of pop star life in perspective, and speaks candid truth to power about trauma, trouble, and recovery.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Demi Lovato: Dancing With The Devil on YouTube