‘Truth or Dare’ (R)

In "Truth or Dare," Alek Keshishian's documentary record of last year's "Blond Ambition" tour, Madonna accomplishes what her career as an actress could not -- she has finally turned herself into a movie star. She has done it by sheer force of will; she was hungry to conquer the big screen in the same way that Hitler was hungry for Poland, and if she couldn't make the transition in other people's films, moving from the dim margins of pop culture glamour to her rightful place at its halogen-bright center, she would make a movie of her own, playing the character she best knows how to play -- herself.

Madonna, the real Madonna, is precisely what "Truth or Dare" promises to deliver, raw, kissing-close and uncensored. But what we get in this sometimes engrossing, sometimes appalling, always entertaining film is something other than "real," something that may in fact be just as revealing as the real thing itself.

The private Madonna we get is just as meticulously created as the other public Madonnas. It's the part of herself that she has mythologized and now accepts -- and asks us to accept -- as real. What we get is the mask beneath the mask. At Keshishian's insistence (or so the story goes), Madonna allowed her every move, her every intimate act, to be filmed, both onstage and off. And so we get to see Madonna shop, Madonna schmooze with Sandra Bernhard, Madonna get made up, Madonna get her throat checked ("Say 'ahhhhh . . . ' "), Madonna cavort and frolic with her gay male dancers, Madonna pray ("Lord, please give me that little something extra . . ."), Madonna storm and Madonna burn.

This is a cagey bit of hagiography, because the movie doesn't always show her at her best. We see her stomping around in a bad temper, barking out orders and reaming out her staff for their foul-ups and incompetence; we see her slam the phone down on Warren Beatty and taunt him onscreen about his vanity ("You can relax, Warren, the light's good in here"); we see her play kissy-face with Kevin Costner, who visits her backstage to tell her that her show was "neat," then, as he walks out, rams her finger down her throat ("Anybody who says my show is 'neat' has to GO!").

All this feels very carefully orchestrated, though, to show us the least appealing of the many faces of Madonna -- Madonna the Bitch. That way, the movie wins points for telling us the ugly, unvarnished truth. And its harshness is balanced out by the other faces -- Madonna the Perfectionist, Madonna the Boss, Madonna the Truth-Teller. Does she makes a fool out of herself? On occasion, sure. What's funny, though, is her failure to realize just what her worst moments are.

The predominant image the film offers is that of Madonna as mother hen to her backup singers and dancers and support personnel. It shows how she ministers to their wounds and hurt feelings, smoothing their feathers and gathering them all under her protective wing. She talks of them constantly as family, hugs them, kisses them and invites them into her bed; she even insists on meeting their parents. Does she really care about them? Probably, after a fashion. But what we're really seeing here is a very carefully modulated management style. Good vibes are necessary for a good show, and if she needs to play the nurturing Italiana Mama, then so be it. Still, the camera picks up the shock on her chickies' faces when Mama Ciccone suddenly turns and cracks the whip, laying down the law. And when, in New York, her makeup girl is drugged, robbed and sodomized, she appears indifferent, even a little amused, then uses this sour incident in the film to illustrate what a bummer part of the tour New York was for her. Everything -- and everyone -- is grist for her star mill.

There are other hollow moments, like the lonely-at-the-top stuff or the scene in which she responds to a rumored protest from the Vatican with a impassioned cry for artistic freedom, and several shameless ones, such as when Madonna pays a visit to her mother's grave (while brother Christopher cringes behind a tree), wondering aloud what she looks like now. "Probably just a bunch of dust." The family material is so central to Madonna's preoccupations -- and her work -- that the visit isn't gratuitous, though. "Truth or Dare" is part bio-pic, part performance art, part corporate portfolio. It's also a portrait of the artist, and what it makes clear is that with Madonna perhaps more than any other performer in history, the singing, the dancing, the records and the videos are all secondary. It's the life that's the work. It shows the extent to which Madonna, as an artist, is both the painter and the canvas.

Is she an artist? Absolutely, but one whose true medium is stardom. The magazine layouts, the interviews, the videos, the ever-changing hairstyles and personas, all of it, are blobs on her palette, her means of expression. And no one on the pop scene shows such a naked avidity to express herself. Watching "Truth or Dare," you get a sense of something unparalleled in pop, especially in the actual concert footage. These production numbers -- which are shot in color (the rest is in pearly black-and-white) -- are lavish pieces of musical theater, as hugely scaled and visually rich as the dance segments in a Vincente Minnelli musical. But cumulatively these performance pieces are personal in a way that no Hollywood musical ever was. Their mythological landscape is all Madonna's; they're about Mommy and Daddy, eroticism and romance, sexual politics, sin and Catholicism. They're all about Madonna.

But what artist's work isn't about that artist? What the star is trying to create is a more resonant, provocative brand of pop, a kind of art pop, but at this stage of her development she's not enough of an artist to pull it off. The music, as vital as it is, isn't as complex and distinctive, and the voice not as expressive, as they need to be. Instead of being transcendent, her work -- the film included -- is merely imaginative, infectious, high-spirited, sexy, danceable, rude and outrageous.

That's not nothing. (Who, right now, is making transcendent pop?) Perhaps the most revealing thing about "Truth or Dare" is how desperate to please this megastar remains. As a performer, she's incredibly generous; she never cheats her audience out of its money's worth. Even at this level of success, she's still trying to justify herself, to justify not just her love but her claims to her current hold on the public mind. Blond Ambition? Certainly, but what "Truth or Dare" demonstrates is that the truth is much more complicated and goes much deeper than that. Blond Hunger may be more like it.

"Truth or Dare" contains nudity, frank discussions of adult sexuality, and adult language.