Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Driving Home 2 U’ Documentary Proves She’s A Rare Grounded Disney Star

The new Olivia Rodrigo documentary on Disney+, Driving Home 2 U (A SOUR Film), is less of a documentary and more of a video companion to her debut album, featuring new live arrangements of each song. And while it’s undeniably a treat to see Rodrigo belt out “Good 4 U” with a string orchestra in the desert, or perform “Traitor” solo with a looping pedal—she really is so talented—for fans who are hoping for a deeper look into Rodrigo’s psyche, this is not the film you’re looking for.

That said, though director Stacey Lee isn’t following Rodrigo around with a camera like a more traditional pop star documentary would, she does capture a few intimate moments. Like, for example, a scene that comes near the middle of the film’s 77-minute runtime, when Rodrigo is in the studio recording the seventh song on Sour, “Enough For You.” She starts crying, and when her producer Dan Nigro asks what’s wrong, she tells him she doesn’t like the song. “It’s just like every other song on the album,” she tells him. “Just different words.”

Later, we see Rodrigo talking to Matt Morris, the Senior Vice President of A&R, Interscope, aka the label about to put out her soon-to-be chart-topping album. Rodrigo expresses her desire for the song to be more emotional, and the adults in the room insist she is overthinking it. “It’s so emotional,” Morris tells her. “Like it literally breaks me every time.” Rodrigo laughs, but you can that she doesn’t quite believe him.

It’s hardly unusual for a pop star, songwriter, and 17-year-old girl to have a bit of a diva moment in the studio. But it’s Rodrigo’s surprisingly self-aware reflection after the fact, in which she aptly analyzes how being a child star has warped her sense of perception, that stands out the most.

“Being a child actor, where you’re constantly told that everything you do is amazing—you literally do the bare minimum, and they’re like, ‘You’re a star!’ I was really disillusioned by that from a very young age,” Rodrigo says. “I was kind of like, ‘Whatever,’ and went to the other side of the spectrum, and started to think everything I did was really bad.” When people told her she did a good job, Rodrigo recalls, she simply didn’t accept it.

It’s a shockingly astute observation from someone who was, again, 17 years old when this was filmed. I guarantee if you go back to my high school diary from when I was 17, I was nowhere near that clear-eyed on my own issues. And yet, Rodrigo has reached a level of understanding about herself that it takes adults years in therapy to achieve. (And, no doubt, Rodrigo has an ace therapist.)

For those unfamiliar with Rodrigo’s past, she was acting by age 12, when she starred as the lead of a direct-to-video American Girl movie, An American Girl: Grace Stirs Up Success. From there she quickly became a Disney star, first as Paige Olvera on the Disney Channel original Bizaardvark for three years, and then as Nini Salazar-Roberts on the Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (where she dated her co-star, Joshua Bassett, whom most fans assume is the boy who broke her heart and inspired Sour).

Though Rodrigo doesn’t mention the studio by name, or even imply any level of blame, being a Disney child star is a notoriously stressful experience—so much so that people often refer to the “curse” of Disney’s young actors, many of whom grew up and developed substance abuse or other mental health issues. It’s clear Rodrigo was not immune to that stress. Later in the documentary, she even calls attention to a lyric in her song “Brutal,” which, she says, summed up her feeling at the time: “Who am I, if not exploited?”

But it’s also clear that Rodrigo has already put in the work to unpack her childhood acting years, and is well aware of how her issues are manifesting in this new phase of her career. She is, it seems, a rare grounded child star—intelligent, insightful, and self-aware. Watch Driving Home 2 U on Disney+, and you’ll see that for yourself. Now let’s all agree to protect her at all costs, OK?

Where to watch Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U