Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Am: Celine Dion’ on Prime Video, A Heartfelt, Harrowing Doc About A Superstar Singer In Crisis

I Am: Celine Dion, now streaming on Prime Video, finds the Canadian singing star in an extremely difficult and painful place, for both her life and her career. Dion announced her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome in 2022, and I Am reveals the background of how that emotional statement to her fans came about. “All I know is singing; it’s what I’ve done all my life. But my condition is not allowing me to give you that right now.” The doc follows Dion as she processes not being able to perform, seeks continued treatment, and experiences sudden waves of the crippling pain that prevents her from doing what she loves. But she’s going to fight. “I won’t stop. I won’t stop. The person I am today, I didn’t invent myself. I didn’t create myself. I am.”    

I AM: CELINE DION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “It’s in the muscle, it’s in the tendons, it’s in the nerves. Music” – and here’s where Celine Dion breaks down, the tears taking over – “I miss it a lot.” I Am: Celine Dion begins in 2021, after the singer and multiple Grammy winner was forced to cancel her Las Vegas concert residency due to the onset of the rare neurological disorder known as stiff-person syndrome. Dion, who lives in Las Vegas with her twin sons Eddy and Nelson, is seen padding around her spacious desert mansion. It’s not like she can be out hitting the town and eating fancy dinners with her family and friends – her condition, together with the cancellations, means she can’t really even leave the house. We see piles of meds and pill boxes in her bathroom – “One more pill, two more pills, too many pills” – and homebound sessions with physiotherapists and nurses. When Dion demonstrates how it sounds when she tries to sing, what comes out is not a blast of the incredible vocal power that made her a star, but a raw and strained rasp. “I don’t want people to hear that,” she says through more tears.

I Am: Celine Dion is not a music documentary that hangs a bunch of celebrity testimonials on a frame combining biographical material with media appearances and performance footage from throughout its subject’s life. There is no narration, and no cutaways to talking head interviews, save those with Dion herself, who is strikingly candid throughout. Instead, I Am features numerous montages of shows from throughout her career – a huge voice for huge hits like “Power of Love” and “My Heart Will Go On” – that are cut against Dion now, as she works to build strength and overcome SPS. Cameras also capture an acute medical emergency. Spasming and unable to speak, the paramedics who are treating Dion must carefully roll her unresponsive body onto a waiting stretcher.

But there is also hope here, and an appreciation of the glam. Before her legs get too tired, Dion tours a private warehouse space that stores a career’s worth of custom stagewear, designer dresses from red carpet appearances, and even mementos and heirlooms from when her kids were young. A later montage captures the good times with her husband, “the love of my life,” René Angélil, who died in 2016. And when she makes some progress vocally, over and over singing the opening lines to the title song for the 2023 Priyanka Chopra Jonas romance Love Again, her managers respond with heartening smiles. “We haven’t heard this for a couple years; it feels like music to us.” 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Joan Baez: I Am A Noise followed the veteran singer and songwriter and she performed maintenance on her three-octave range and guitar-playing fingers in advance of a celebratory tour. And    

Performance Worth Watching: Celine Dion is basically in every shot of I Am, and often while she is thoroughly away from the spotlight – in her jammies, responding to pain she’s experiencing, performing grueling stretching exercises instead of singing in front of thousands of people. It’s revealing, to say the least. 

Memorable Dialogue: The lengthy timeline of Dion’s condition is startling. “17 years ago, I started to experience voice spasming. This is the way it started, and it freaked me out. Because normally when you’re tired as a singer, because you did a show the night before, your voice would go roughly half a key down, or one note down.” Her voice was suddenly going up, and she was losing her ability to control it.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s striking whenever I Am: Celine Dion cuts between clips of her effortlessly singing an absolutely enormous power ballad on stage and struggling while hoarse to hit even one clean note. This is what stiff-person syndrome has robbed her of, and beyond the very real threats to her well-being, she speaks about it as a professional humiliation. It’s her own body failing her collaborators’ professional expectations, and it bothers her to no end. “The highest note and whatever,” she tells the intimate camera before her, summarizing her talent. “Celine Dion, she’s the best.” But the sentence trails off, replaced by what seems like a typical cocktail of anger, sadness, and frustration. “What’s gonna happen?” Dion asks her physical therapist later, after a particularly scary flare-up of her condition. If the stimulation of her brain’s pleasure centers – you know, like what she loves and does for a living, all of that singing and performing – if the result of that is her body entering shut-down mode, how will she ever sing for her fans again? It’s pretty heartbreaking, and I Am admirably, powerfully, does not pull away from Celine Dion’s emotion as she processes every latest setback.

Some of the material included here isn’t as effective, like a kooky 2018 appearance on Fallon that feels out of place, or an extended visit to the vocal editing suite for the film Love Again. But despite the nearly constant presence of her condition, Dion herself is indefatigable, and every now and then tosses off a quick sketch of her legendary vocal style. Her ability to sing at a high level might have been stolen from her. But I Am: Celine Dion does well to balance her journey toward recovery with moments that highlight who she is as a person, not just a stiff-person. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Imagine making your whole life, your whole livelihood, out of loving to sing and perform. Now imagine having that ability physically ripped away. I Am: Celine Dion hangs with the singer through all of the unvarnished moments, as she works to manage her condition and fights to find a way back to being healthy and singing again. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) 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.