All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
There's a lot going on in the two-hour runtime. Goldin herself narrates a running recap of her career, from her troubled childhood to her blossoming as a key member of New York City's LGBT subculture in the 70s and 80s. Goldin's work often took the form of a slideshow that she presented at film festivals and clubs, and the documentary often borrows from this format by showing lengthy series of photos of Goldin's favorite subjects, including moments of candid intimacy between gay couples and drag queens. The format is effective in giving the viewer a pretty good picture of what it might have been like to be in and around the community during that time, portraying a life of freedom, community, and sexual awakening.
Watching the development of Goldin's rebel spirit is important to understanding her persistence in battling the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, the now-defunct company that misled the public about the addictiveness of OxyContin, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. The documentary's modern-day scenes follow Goldin and her advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) as they embark on a series of protests at various large art institutions to try to convince the art world to stop taking money from the Sacklers, whose enormous generational art collection has long been donated to museums around the world.
P.A.I.N.'s protests are performative and effective, and its fascinating to see the balance of the group's joy in the actual protest combined with their pain behind the protest's purpose. Goldin, revealed to be a recovering opioid addict herself, is always front and center, becoming a persistent thorn in the Sackler's side. You don't see a lot of the Sackler's themselves, but they are a constant specter over the entire documentary. Goldin has no qualms about saying "I hate them" right to the camera, and it's easy to understand why.
If anything, the documentary suffers from having multiple interesting topics that each could've supported a documentary themselves. Goldin's career retrospective is given a large chunk of the running time, and I found myself getting frustrated that the focus wasn't centered more around P.A.I.N. and their battle with the Sacklers. We only see the protests and the wins, not a more in-depth accounting of the longer struggle. Similarly, this could've easily been turned into a feature about the 70s/80s subculture in New York, as several names of other artists and activists are thrown out there without really understanding what any of them did.
But Goldin's life story and dogged determination is certainly an effective hook, and a valuable reminder of what it takes to earn any kind of victory against corrupt billionaires.
