‘Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story’ Review: Minnelli Doc

Anyone who’s ever seen Liza Minnelli perform knows that while the love she draws from the audience is her oxygen, the love she pours right back is just as essential to who she is. That symbiosis is the power source illuminating Bruce David Klein’s lovingly assembled docu-portrait, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, an apt title for a salute to a woman who never met a sentence she couldn’t punctuate with superlatives. The raucous cackle Minnelli lets loose at frequent intervals while reflecting on her life attests that her struggles and sorrows and physical frailty have not defeated her.

The film opens with a dizzying montage of magazine covers and clips accompanied by a stream of gushy praise from prominent fans. Klein seldom shrinks away from adoration, but nor does he gloss over the challenges for the star of being born into a spotlight, living up to a lifetime of comparisons to her mother, Judy Garland, and carving out her own space while every short-lived romance, failed marriage and downslide into alcoholism and substance abuse became tabloid fodder. It’s not hagiography when the subject’s generosity of spirit infuses the entire doc.

That generosity applies especially to the fulsome acknowledgement she shows for the five mentors without whom she might never have succeeded in inventing a persona so luminous it requires only a first name. With a Z.

Leading that quintet is Kay Thompson, the vocal coach, nightclub performer and godmother who swooped in at Garland’s funeral to take the shattered 23-year-old Minnelli under her wing. It’s been widely speculated that Thompson’s popular Eloise books, about a girl living with her nanny on the top floor of Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, were inspired by Liza.

An insanely talented performer whose looks were considered not right for movie musicals — watch her sing “Think Pink!” in Funny Face and weep — Thompson gave her goddaughter this crucial nugget of wisdom: “Don’t go around with people you don’t like,” one of several pithy quotes that provide the film’s chapter headings. Minnelli paid extended tribute to Thompson in her last Broadway engagement, Liza’s at the Palace, in 2008. As Jim Caruso, a vocalist-dancer in that production, says: “I think Kay the mentor made Liza the superstar possible.”

No less instrumental in Minnelli’s development was French chansonnier Charles Aznavour, who taught her how to act a song, making every lyric come from the heart. Watching her perform pretty much any song highlights that skill, perhaps none better than “But the World Goes ‘Round” from New York, New York at the end of the film, with present-day Liza accompanied at the piano by Michael Feinstein, melting into footage of her big-belt glory days.

Next up on the mentor list is Bob Fosse, who directed Minnelli to an Oscar win in Cabaret and an Emmy for the landmark TV special, Liza With a Z.  Having grown up on her mother’s film sets as well as the soundstages where her father Vincente Minnelli’s movie musicals were shot, dance was in her DNA. And while she never quite had the precision of a great Fosse dancer, he brought discipline, focus and attitude to her moves, relaxing his notorious perfectionism enough to find ways to show the performer to her best advantage. “I’m a director’s daughter,” she says with a flutter of those epic false eyelashes. “I knew how to handle him.”

Musical theater lyricist Fred Ebb loomed large in both her professional and personal life, becoming a close friend and big-brother figure until his death in 2004. Ebb and longtime composer partner John Kander cast Minnelli in her first Broadway show, Flora the Red Menace, and their work remained an inextricable part of her career, through Cabaret, Liza With a Z, New York, New York, The Act and The Rink, as well as her stint in the original run of Chicago on Broadway, stepping in for just over a month as an unbilled substitute to save the production while Gwen Verdon was recovering from surgery.

Performing with her mother in 1964 at the London Palladium was a defining moment for Liza, but Ebb encouraged her to steer talk away from Garland in interviews, observing that the comparison made her insecure. Minnelli freely acknowledges that Ebb more than anyone made her the consummate performer she became: “I think Fred really invented me. He knew me so deeply.”

Halston was the other major force, designing her costumes for Liza With a Z and giving her a signature look from which she never strayed. One-time Halston staffer Naeem Khan reveals that sequins were indispensable to hide the sweat on stage. The American fashion pioneer also factors into Minnelli’s years as a New York nightlife fixture, a charter member of the celeb coterie at Studio 54.

That section also points up the selectivity of Minnelli’s reminiscences, which seems less the result of self-censorship than of a determination to focus on the positives. While the free-flowing supply of Qaaludes, cocaine and poppers at Studio 54 has been widely documented, she insists, “Nobody did drugs. They just didn’t.”

In the same way, she declines to spill tea about former husbands and romantic partners — among them Peter Allen, Jack Haley Jr., Aznavour, Martin Scorsese, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Desi Arnaz Jr., Peter Sellers and David Gest — other than to talk up friendships that often outlasted the relationships. “Give me a gay break,” she tells Klein when he tries to draw her out on the subject. It’s left to friends to observe how she threw herself into a relationship with a ton of passion, but then the song ends and you move on to the next one, making “Maybe This Time” a perfect anthem.

Nervous, shaky but still full of spark in the connective interview (she has firm ideas on camera angles), Minnelli gives the impression of never holding back and always being her true self even if that is also part performance. She created a family around her of loyal friends, who perhaps helped ease the sadness of never having children, a crushing blow splashed across gossip pages with every miscarriage. She doesn’t shy away from her addiction issues but again, the chief discussion of that subject comes from friends and colleagues.

Longtime admirers might be disappointed by the omission of any talk of her non-musical roles, most notably The Sterile Cuckoo, Arthur or her priceless appearances as Lucille #2 on Arrested Development. And given that her photo should appear next to encyclopedia entries for “Gay Icon,” the failure to address the queer community’s centrality to her fandom seems an oversight.

But these are minor quibbles with a film that deploys a wealth of great archival material plus intimate access to the subject and those closest to her to build a gorgeous portrait of a legendary showbiz survivor, warmly celebratory but also unquestionably authentic.