Review:Whitney: Can I Be Me (15)

What’s missing from his new film about the late Whitney Houston, though, is his usual intrepid on-camera efforts to track down the prize interviewees: in this case Houston’s former husband Bobby Brown and her long long-time associate Robyn Crawford, with whom she was rumoured to be in a relationship.

Instead, he has access to never-before-seen footage from an abandoned 1999 backstage documentary and he augments this with dozens of interviews with estranged family members and former employees. What emerges is still a fascinating story, one that gives a decent overview of Houston’s troubled background and career. It also locates the seeds of her demise – she was found dead in a hotel bathtub in 2012 – in the moment she met self-styled R&B bad boy Bobby Brown. The fatefulness of that meeting is certainly amplified by the fact it coincided with Whitney being booed by her peers at the 1989 Soul Train awards for the so-called crime of “selling out”, however the film as a whole lacks the scope and historical insight necessary to develop this into a rigorous thesis about the way race, gender and sexuality contributed to her tragic downfall.