What a film is about is not the same thing as the story it tells. This is useful to remember when watching the new Netflix documentary Britney vs Spears, released in advance of an important legal hearing on her case in Los Angeles the following day. The film purports to be about the controversial conservatorship which Spears has been under since January 2008. And on the surface, it is. But it is just as much and arguably even more actually about fundamentally broken family relationships, and the down-swirl of the personal disaster which can stem from that unattended dysfunction.

The Spears conservatorship, a once hotly reported-upon topic that somewhat faded into a curio as Spears mounted a successful Las Vegas residency, is now once again more than just an entertainment industry story. Over the past two years, and for a variety of reasons, it has become a much bigger and, in many ways, symbolic tale, morphing into its own bona fide hashtag movement with both online and offline activism. The February release of the documentary Framing Britney Spears further fanned inflamed opinion against the conservatorship, and its recent sequel Controlling Britney Spears, in addition to a separate CNN special and other news coverage, have kept the issue in the spotlight.

Directed by Erin Lee Carr, Britney vs Spears painstakingly unpacks all the most relevant known details of the 13-year conservatorship, from the stealthiness of its installation at a time of high crisis for the pop singer to Spears’s rebuffed attempts to secure her own lawyer instead of a court-appointed attorney, and now extricate herself from it. Viewers of the aforementioned specials will see plenty of familiar faces here, like longtime assistant Felicia Culotta.

But Carr’s movie does this saga a great service by going back in time to try to properly contextualize the framework for the conservatorship. This includes charting Spears’ rise to stardom, but also looking at past relationships, and most notably Spears’s high-profile divorce and erratic public behavior in 2006-07. Providing some perspective here is Adnan Ghalib, the paparazzo-turned-boyfriend, and to a lesser extent Sam Lutfi, who is either her onetime manager or a glorified errand boy depending on whom you believe. While not interviewed, ex-husband Kevin Federline and fiancé Jason Trawick also receive extended glances. Above all else, what the film most effectively captures (occasionally dropping all voiceover to simply let unfiltered video footage play out) is the spiraling insanity almost always surrounding Spears, the crushing demands on her.

Most of Britney vs Spears is told in tandem with journalist Jenny Eliscu, who becomes part of the story herself after meeting up with Spears in a secret hotel rendezvous in January 2009, to get her to sign documents requesting a change in lawyers. Carr alludes to her and Eliscu starting a project together on Spears much earlier, but not getting people to talk to them. Here they get more cooperation, and also receive a trove of confidential conservatorship documents. This material is the movie’s big “get,” and represents the deepest look yet into the sealed court proceedings dictating Spears’s life. Much of the movie’s latter half actually features this duo as narrator-guides, sitting together and establishing a timeline, parsing certain revelations and juxtaposing them with conflicting information publicly presented at the time. It’s not necessarily the most dynamic storytelling, but when intercut with specific reminiscences, like a rather heartbreaking handwritten letter slipped to friend Andrew Gallery and intended for wider dissemination, it shrewdly undercuts the well-manicured myth of Spears being unable to comprehend her financial circumstances or the parameters enforced on her life.

Carr’s sympathies (she mentions her enormous fandom as a 10-year-old) seem to color her judgment some, and perhaps her biography does as well. As the daughter of late esteemed journalist David Carr, who struggled with addiction, Carr and her twin sister spent time in foster care while her father was in rehab; in 2019 she published a memoir about this and other aspects of her childhood.

Still, Britney vs Spears can’t seem to address head-on the fissures and chasms of its subject’s chaotic family life. Perhaps it’s in part because none of the interviewees are of the actual family — that would be fair. But direct engagement with the topics of addiction, depression, and mental illness also seems too intense, like staring into the sun. Instead, Britney vs Spears merely hints at discord and estrangement, and her father Jamie’s alcoholism. He is, of course, painted as one of the chief villains, since he’s generally regarded as overtly parasitic, serving as both conservators of Spears’s person and co-conservator of her estate. But it’s quite telling that Spears’s mother, brother and sister are not present in this story.

The underlying theme, made textual in a line of voiceover from Adnan Ghalib and reinforced by a couple of other interviewees, is that Spears suffered from a lack of anyone in her life whom she could trust, most especially in her family. The picture that then emerges is that of a goodhearted young woman — perhaps naïve and lacking in formal education and a proper support system, but certainly highly functioning and goal-oriented — yearning for connection, casting out lines wherever she could, in probably ill-advised but somewhat understandable and age-appropriate ways.

That the tide of public opinion on this issue has turned in Spears’s favor is not surprising, given the current cultural winds of patriarchal overthrow and accountability. (It’s also worth noting that Mathew Rosengart, Spears’s new attorney, is married to IDPR president and Hollywood power publicist Mara Buxbaum.) The more interesting film, then, could and would have attempted to push past the surface tragedy of this suppression and disproportionate handcuffing, to examine how untreated family dysfunction and mental health conditions fueled bad decision-making and left Spears sadly susceptible to gross manipulation. Britney vs Spears, though, is a bit too polite, and deferential to the sensitivities of its beleaguered subject. That doesn’t make it a bad movie — just one that lacks the same hard-driving ambition as its subject.