By Variety | Created at 2025-01-15 03:21:54 | Updated at 2025-01-15 08:49:05
5 hours ago
Not many non-performing contemporary songwriters are quite interesting enough to sustain a 90-minute documentary, but then, not many are Diane Warren, one of the great characters of modern Hollywood. Despite having a self-owned song catalog whose worth is estimated at up to a half-billion dollars, and despite famously having 15 Oscar nominations and a lifetime achievement award, Warren still maintains the aura and attitude of a street hustler, as if every new tune she’s pitching to the studios or the stars is the one that’ll finally catch her a break. You almost have to come up with a whole new multi-hyphenate descriptor to sum her up … something like mogul-urchin.
The new documentary “Diane Warren: Relentless” goes a long way toward first recapping the broad strokes of her story, for those who are encountering her on the late side, and satisfying additional curiosities that may still be held by those already familiar with Warren’s Horatio Alger-worthy rise and 35-year plateau. The subtitle comes as something of an understatement (it’s a polite abridgment of the “relentless as fuck” bracelet that Warren proudly shows off). And the gratitude that someone like Cher has for her, for reviving her career with “If I Could Turn Back Time,” doesn’t mean she won’t hang up on Warren, on camera, when she feels the songwriter is getting too pushy.
There are a lot of possible psychological hang-ups that director Bess Kargman throws out as potential reasons why her subject is the way she is, leaving the audience to sort out exactly which neurosis might be most responsible for Warren’s array of awards and wealth. One thing that unites some of the oldest images of Warren on display, dating back to when she was a middle-class Van Nuys teenager, and the ones of her as the queen of her world today: She’s constantly giving the camera the finger. But that sense of defiance goes hand-in-hand with a sense of neediness in Warren’s driven world.
Her family of origin goes some way toward explaining that push-pull: Dad was supportive, while mother was un-nurturing in the extreme, to the point that Warren devotes a chunk of her big, climactic Oscar speech to having proven her mom wrong — something that comes to seem like a daily devotion. Other factors come into play: As recounted here, Warren revealed that she was sexually molested as a child when it comes time to talk about the rape-themed documentary that she brought Lady Gaga in on as a collaborator, “Till It Happens to You.” There’s also loose talk, among the many friends interviewed, of Warren being “on the spectrum” or having Asberger’s syndrome, which might — might — explain why she’s the most garrulous dedicated loner you could ever hope to meet, on or off screen.
Warren has never shied away from acknowledging her lack of a love life. Among the headlines she shows off are those pointing out that the queen of romantic ballads says she’s never been in love herself — the kind of classic, ironic hook that makes you wonder why a documentary wasn’t attempted much sooner. (Or, probably, it was, and she’s just been as good at turning down filmmaker suitors as she is at nixing romance.) Warren acknowledges that there is speculation she’s gay, but insists she’s just an especially disinterested brand of straight; the film has her reuniting with a fellow producer, Guy Roche, whom she is said to have had her last romance with, more than 30 years ago. No less a pal than Clive Davis turns up to testify that “to my knowledge she’s never really been in love.” Paul Stanley of KISS “plays psychiatrist,” as he puts it, to speculate that “it’s easier to write about heartbreak when you don’t have to live it, but you fear it.” Hmm … maybe.
For Warren’s own part, she says she’s playing a character when she writes classic love songs — the character of, like, the rest of a more lovelorn humanity — and offers this commentary on her own lyrics from the Oscar-nominated Aerosmith smash “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”: “I don’t want anybody kissing my eyes. I don’t want anybody staying up all night to hear me breathe. … What the fuck are you kissing my eyes for?” (If only she had the gumption to turn that hilarious retort into an actual answer song: “I’m Good With Missing All of It.”)
Warren does have one great love, besides her beloved cats: Oscar — or, as she pithily put it when she was given the lifetime achievement award, “Mom, I finally found a man.” Of course, her 15 nominations in the best original song category without a win to date have made the Susan Lucci angle as big a magnet for press coverage as the never-been-in-love angle. How seriously does she take it? Very, reports Clive Davis, who describes her as miserable the night her Lady Gaga collab lost to Billie Eilish, even though he supposes she should have been celebrating the live telecast performance that was meant to inspire millions of assault survivors. But, to play shrink, as so many of her pals happily do in this film, maybe the Academy is like both her parents: The music branch is always happy to dole out praise, like her dad, in the form of a nomination, but mom’s wish that she become a secretary instead finally prevails in the general voting.
The psychological complexity doesn’t end there: There’s probably some kind of Freudian explanation for why Warren was long since rich enough to own her own gleaming Hollywood office tower, and retreats daily to work on songs in a writing room so disheveled that even a tunesmith at the bottom of the latter might fear to enter. But somehow it all more or less fits together, in Kargman’s reasonably holistic portrait of a powerful showbiz figure who still seems closer to her old teen runaway/juvenile delinquent self than anyone’s idea of a businesswoman or socialite.
Although the inner-motivation stuff is well covered, those who admire Warren’s acumen within the music industry could wish the running time was just a little more padded, to cover some side angles that aren’t much addressed. Like, has Warren’s career been hampered or bolstered by the fact that she’s pretty much the last outlier in the business who will only write alone, shutting out all the modern artists who demand to bring in a team and co-write? And is her recent focus on film work — with nominations the last seven years in a row (possibly soon to be eight) — to do with how little room there is for “Un-Break My Heart”-style ballads in the world of rhythmic pop now, or a real love for the world of the movies, or Oscar zeal?
But even with some unexplored territory when it comes to the music business, and to the actual mechanics of writing, “Diane Warren: Relentless” comes through in presenting its subject as a complicated, vulnerable, cocky and almost counterintuitively charming figure you just want to hang around with a lot more. Even if it’s so that, like Cher, you’ve earned the right to occasionally hang up on her.
