‘Let the Canary Sing’ Review: A Cyndi Lauper Documentary Captures Her Cracked Pop Joy, but It’s Too Celebratory to Dig Into the Drama

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around.

I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long.

Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star.

The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world. When she first launched into orbit in 1983, Cyndi Lauper was such a powerful singer, so brazenly anthemic in her joy and attack, with such a head-turning new image (the punk cockatoo hair, the frosted kewpie-doll-meets-Sid Vicious lip pucker, the stylized Brooklyn street-urchin voice, the thrift-shop layers of dresses and earrings and bangles and fishnets, and the way that she’d contort her body, as if she were in too much ecstasy to worry about which direction her limbs were pointing) that she seemed at once totally outside the box and utterly inevitable.