Being a female celebrity is like navigating an endless tightrope. You have to be pretty, but relatably so. You have to be confident, but never cocky. You can have opinions, but not strong ones. You have to be sexy, but not too sexy. And so on.

And, as the remarkable new Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, establishes, when you’re Taylor Swift, and you’ve grown up in the public eye, this tightrope is constantly swaying, as public expectations of you shift and change.

When she first broke through in the music industry at the age of 16, it really was enough for her to be pretty, nice, and talented—a “good girl.” But then she became so successful that a backlash was inevitable—in America, the only thing we love more than building someone up is knocking them down—and just like that, the very things that made her successful were now a detriment. She was too pretty. Too nice. She was obviously fake. Conceited. A backstabber. And what about her stubbornly neutral stance on all things political? Was she an airhead? Or, worse still, a secret Trump supporter? (Gasp!)

Lana Wilson’s documentary shows Swift coming to terms with all these paradoxes. At first, Swift admits, they were overwhelming. One minute she was the most beloved girl in the world, the next minute she was something of a pariah. Of course, she was still wildly popular—a teen idol, a multi-platinum recording artist—but suddenly everything she wore, everything she ate, and everyone she dated was a source of endless speculation, debate, and curiosity.

Miss Americana is clearly an authorized documentary. As such, we get incredible access—backstage, in the recording studio, on her tour airplane. There are also things we don’t get (Swift remains very tight-lipped about her private life). To me, it’s a fair tradeoff, particularly because Swift is so forthcoming, bordering on confessional. The star admits that she struggled with an eating disorder and bouts of self-loathing. She talks about her feelings of powerlessness during a sexual assault lawsuit (she won the case against a DJ who had violated her). Through it all, she comes across as not just a preternaturally talented musician, but also amazingly smart, witty, self-deprecating, and self-aware.

The film’s pivotal moment comes when Swift decides to endorse Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, over a Marsha Blackburn, an extreme conservative, in Tennessee’s 2018 midterm election.

Her team, including her father, frantically urge her to reconsider. She’ll be alienating half her fans, if not more—and for what? Better to stay pretty and blank, an avatar for everyone’s hopes and dreams. But she insists that she needs to do this—for herself if nobody else. There’s an incredible scene as she’s about to put out her first social media post endorsing Bredesen. Her finger hovers over her phone tremulously until she musters the courage to hit send. It feels like a “before and after” moment—and she waits, with equal parts exhilaration and fear.

Of course, that endorsement didn’t ruin her career. If anything, it gained her more fans (Blackburn, however, ended up winning the election). And it’s all part of Swift’s journey toward self-discovery. Toward the end of the film, Swift muses that celebrities get “frozen at the age they become famous.” Miss Americana is about her breaking free of that 16-year-old “good girl” she was and becoming the multi-dimensional 30-year-old woman she is today.

The fact that I’ve never seen a single production of Cats has always been a point of personal pride. I’ve always known, in an intuitive sort of way, that the musical just wasn’t for me: I’m not a fan of the over-wrought, pseudo-rock bombast of Andrew Lloyd Webber, I neither know nor have any interest in finding out what a Jellicle Cat is, and, most importantly, I’m firmly Team Dog. (I have been known to love individual cats, but I am hardly what one would call a cat person.)

Still, I am nothing if not professional and once I heard that Tom Hooper had directed a film version of the musical, I knew I was going to have to suck it up and see the damn thing.

And let me say this: I can’t say for sure that all productions of Cats are bad (although I have a hunch) but I can certainly say that this one is.

How. . .did this happen? How did they decide that the best course of action was to take some combination of actual make-up and CGI and create these sort of horrifying cat-human hybrids, with what looks like real fur and whiskers growing off of their human-shaped bodies? And why, oh why, do the female cats have breasts? Why are their hands and feet human? Why on earth is Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella wearing nail polish?? Why does one cat appear to have a handlebar mustache? Am I on catnip?

What’s more: Once they’d made these choices (for choices, I suppose, had to be made) how did they then look at the finished product and say, ta da! Yes, this is complete and this will be our Christmas release, a film we fully hope and expect will garner Oscar nominations and glory for all those involved and that definitely won’t give nightmares to small, impressionable children.

If you ask me, this thing was doomed from the start. Maybe you can get away with humans dressed as cats on stage, where there is a comfortable distance between audience and actor, where we are more inclined to suspend our disbelief and give into the artifice of a thing. But in film, an inherently intimate genre, this was never going to work. The humanoid cats, rather than being inspiring or adorable or magical, are just kind of disturbing.

And it’s not just the costumes. I find the whole endeavor bizarre. I realize it’s all loosely based off T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated—highbrow!—but maybe that’s where it should’ve stayed? I still can’t believe that a musical featuring songs called “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” “The Rum Tum Tugger,” “Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer,” and “Skimbelshanks, the Railway Cat” went on to become one of the longest running Broadway productions of all time. (I also love that in the midst of all this fantastical wordplay is a song called “Memory.” So basic.)

Lord knows the actors here aren’t to blame. There are lots of talented people up on that screen, chief among them Dame Judi Dench as the all-seeing cat matriarch, Old Deuteronomy; Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatre Cat, who is given one last triumphant hurrah at the Jellicle Ball; and Idris Elba as our villainous Macavity (for whatever reason, Elba is the least CGI’d of them all; had I seen him on the street I would not think, “ooh, a cat!” but might’ve assumed the poor fellow had just had a rough night). Others, including James Corden, (who gave me my only genuine laugh of the proceedings in a bit involving a failed catapult) and a curiously sexy (albeit now famously denuded) Jason Derulo as the aforementioned Rum Tum Tigger, give it their all. Honestly, they all give it their all, including wide-eyed newcomers Francesca Hayward (of the Royal Ballet Company) and Laurie Davidson, playing what passes for the romantic leads of this endeavor (they nuzzle a lot).

There are other big names: Taylor Swift, getting a featured number as a vampish sex kitten who swoops into the ball on a crescent moon, is just fine. (But a star isn’t born.) And, more significantly, there’s Jennifer Hudson, as Grizabella, who sings the show’s featured hit, “Memory.”

Readers, it gives me no pleasure to report that Jennifer Hudson is . . . not great in this role. She is, objectively, a brilliant singer and she could’ve crushed the song. But she chose, instead, to emote a lot during the singing—crying, gulping, quavering—in such a way that the song loses its sonic purity. She’s clearly gunning for that Oscar here and someone—specifically Tom Hooper—should’ve held her back. Also—and this is not an exaggeration—her character, a formerly fancy uptown cat kicked to the streets, spends roughly 90 percent of the film with a snot bubble coming out of her nose. This obviously wasn’t a detail from the play—you can’t see snot bubbles from a live theater audience. So this was a specific and deliberate choice made by the producers. Justice for J-Hud.

As for the dancing: Apparently the entire cast went to something called Cat School to learn how to move and pounce and climb like a cat. Maybe they should’ve stayed longer? Only a few times in the film did I feel that the movement approximated actual cats. Cats are remarkably nimble and slinky creatures—they do things like arch their backs when they get scared and lick themselves to groom. They have uncanny balance and climbing ability and curl into tight balls when they sleep. But you see very little of that in the film. Mostly, these people just look like exceptionally good human dancers in creepy cat costumes.

What can I say? I knew I wasn’t going to like Cats and I didn’t. It’s possible, I suppose, that if you are predisposed to liking Cats you will like this movie. But I doubt it. Some things are best left on stage. As for me, I wish I could go back to a time before I’d seen Cats. To quote the famous song: “I remember the time I knew what happiness was. Let the memory live again.”