Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shania Twain: Not Just A Girl’ on Netflix, A Doc That Reflects On Her Lively Life And Lengthy Career

Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl (Netflix) covers the “Any Man of Mine” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” singer and songwriter’s career from its earliest beginnings, singing in Ontario bars while still a grade schooler, to her records defining a dynamic hybrid of country music and pop flash and selling millions and millions of copies. It’s a story of struggle, success, loss, and love. Twain herself is interviewed extensively alongside appearances from Lionel Richie, Orville Peck, Kelsea Ballerini, Diplo, and Jon Landau.

SHANIA TWAIN: NOT JUST A GIRL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Shania Twain herself is your guide for Not Just a Girl. The veteran singer and songwriter, winner of five Grammy Awards, and one of the best-selling artists in music history sits in her home in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, cross-legged and comfortable on a never ending series of beautifully-appointed ottomans, and tells her story basically from the beginning. She was raised with her five siblings in Timmins, Ontario. Money was tight, and “growing up in a violent household was horrible,” she says, but also calls her mother the biggest early supporter of her talent. Twain was playing guitar by 8, and started singing in area bars after last call. The budding professional had one hundred songs in her repertoire, because she liked to take requests.

By 1981, Twain was already looking into rock music alongside her country sound, and Not Just a Girl includes an archival recording of her singing a cover of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” She was also writing songs and recording demos. But tragedy struck in 1987 when her parents were killed in a car accident, and Twain took a singing job at a Canadian resort in order to support her younger siblings. In 1993 she finally made it to Nashville, secured a contract with Mercury, and realized that a woman had to work three times as hard as a guy in order to get anywhere in country music. So she did that work. “To be relentless was the only way.”

The Woman in Me, released in February 1995, was Twain’s first album with producer Mutt Lange, whose extensive background in rock music informed her sound. It sold millions of albums in less than six months, Twain and Lange fell in love and got married, quickly returned to the studio to write songs for a follow-up, and 1997’s Come On Over – you may have heard its teensy-weensy singles, songs like “You’re Still the One” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” –  was an even bigger worldwide hit.

As Not Just a Girl accelerates to its finish, Twain’s son Eja is born, her third hit album Up! is released, she contracts Lyme Disease, suffers from dizziness and issues with her singing voice, and gets divorced in 2010, after Lange cheated on her with Twain’s best friend. But it doesn’t dwell on the bad times. She regains her confidence as a singer through a collaboration with Lionel Richie, gives new voice to her creativity by writing and recording a record on her own, and even mounts a successful stage show at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. “Taking the risks to do things your own way can be scary,” Twain says. “You just gotta dive in.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The recent Sheryl Crow documentary has a similar rags-to-riches framing to Not Just a Girl, as well as an empowering message of dogged self-determination. And Shania Twain explored her divorce, the issues with her voice, collaborations with Lionel Richie and Michael Buble, and her eventual remarrying in the 2011 docuseries Why Not? with Shania Twain, which originally aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Performance Worth Watching: Sitting in conversation, strumming her guitar on a lazy boat ride through Switzerland, appearing on the back of a horse – she’s on at least three different horses in Not Just a Girl, and at least once while on stage – and riding a sci-fi motorcycle in the trippy video for the Up!-era single I’m Gonna Get You Good!: Shania Twain is always at ease, and it’s that comfortability you realize has been integral to her music and songwriting for decades.

Memorable Dialogue: “Shania Twain brought a rebel spirit to the genre that hadn’t existed for a couple decades,” journalist Eve Barlow says in Not Just a Girl. “Even just the fun of that line, ‘Let’s go, girls,’ that’s her rallying cry. Like, come join me. Come be a part of my gang. Come do things the way I do things. Don’t be shamed into not expressing yourself just because you’re a beautiful woman who might be too much for someone.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing but Shania’s midriff in iconic videos for “What Made You Say That” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” a midriff, she’s proud to say, she was adamant be exposed.

Our Take: Not Just a Girl is Shania Twain’s show, a documentary that blends familiar autobiographical beats with highlights of her own brand of fervent feminism. So while his work as a producer and collaborator remains important to her story, it’s no surprise that Robert John “Mutt” Lange – her one time husband who slept with her best friend – isn’t interviewed here. Instead, Not Just a Girl is very conscious to include interviews with musicians a generation younger than Twain. Kelsea Ballerini and Orville Peck each work inside a fertile overlay of country and pop music, and they offer testimonials to the industry barriers Twain broke, the powerful songs she wrote, and the voice she gave to those who needed it, not only as a woman in music but as an inspiration to the LGBTQ community. It puts a satisfying spin on the vigor and flash of something like “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” a song that is still rightly upheld for its feminist shorthand swagger, but deserves to live in the real world, too.

Our Call: STREAM IT. For anyone unfamiliar with Shania Twain’s history, Not Just a Girl fills in all the backstory blanks. But it also puts into perspective the feminist streak in her songwriting, and lets Twain herself elaborate on a career that’s spanned four decades.

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