For a very long time, Tina Turner has wanted to stop talking in interviews about her abusive ex-husband, the highly talented and very troubled music producer Ike Turner. Yet the larger-than-life dimensions of her second act as a global rock star—finally independent of the man who overshadowed her tremendous talent and threatened her life—have meant that for the last 40 years, her trauma has been played and replayed like a hit television series.
Tina, a new and definitive documentary directed by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin and premiering on HBO on March 27, succeeds in telling us exactly what happened—making skillful use of musical analysis, archival footage, and audio recordings, and interviews with prominent musicians and journalists who got to know Tina Turner before, during, and after her ’80s revival. But it also honors Turner’s wish to be relinquished from the constant rehashing of her most painful moments. Her new interview in the film allows her to speak authoritatively on her own celebrity and personal life without having to revisit the sordid details of the abuse she experienced at the hands of Ike. And though it doesn’t shy away from the darkness held within her biography, Tina turns decidedly toward the light. The result is a film that shines, both in its passion for Turner’s talent and the depth and complexity of her character.
Tina is a whirling rock documentary that gives us all the hits and then some, including extensive clips from sold-out shows and TV appearances, alongside new interviews with music journalist Kurt Loder (who co-wrote her bestselling memoir, I, Tina), longtime friend Oprah Winfrey, actor Angela Bassett (who was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Turner in the 1993 film What’s Love Got to Do With It), and more. Formally speaking, it doesn’t veer from tradition, like Sophie Fiennes’s adventurous 2017 documentary Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami did. But like that film, Tina’s methodology fits its subject.
Turner is both playful and straightforward in demeanor and communication; the film follows her story from childhood to present while dipping in and out of reflection and clarification. In a striking audio recording from one of her interviews with Loder from the early ’80s, Turner confesses to a profound sense of loneliness, of never having received love in her entire life. It’s an observation that comes before she meets her current husband and after we learn about what she describes as her systematic estrangement from her own children, a condition of her musical and marital union with Ike. (Turner says she remained close only with her eldest son Craig, whose biological father was not Ike. Craig died of suicide in 2018.)
Yet the throughline of Tina’s story isn’t her abusive ex-husband, it’s her extraordinary magnetism and self-belief as an artist. Is it possible to name another woman—let alone a Black woman—who became a megawatt star in her 40s, after having already had a very respectable career in her 20s? That wasn’t a happy accident or corporate concoction, either. Turner had to fight to become a rock star rather than a singer categorized solely by her race or her associations with a man. And there’s something mysterious about her ability to see beyond the present even in her most grueling moments: In the ’60s, recording an incredible song with then legendary and now infamous pop producer Phil Spector, only for it to go ignored in the U.S. largely because of racism; in the late ’70s, performing nonstop in Vegas just to make ends meet after a divorce where she was left with nothing but the name “Tina Turner.” How and why did she keep going? What could she see coming that the rest of the world didn’t?
Much of the answer lies in Turner’s childhood as Anna Mae Bullock, which she and Loder dove into in I, Tina. Loder sets the historical stage of World War II and segregation, which Turner builds upon with personal anecdotes of her sharecropping family and church choir experience in Nutbush, Tennessee. The film doesn’t do as much contextualization as the memoir, but it does allow recordings between Turner and Loder as well as Turner’s interview for the film to evoke both the small joys and extreme difficulties of her country upbringing. In that way, Tina becomes a more intimate portrait of the star as she sees herself, and not only as others have seen her.
Of course, the documentary also features audio recordings from the 1981 People interview in which Turner revealed to unexpecting journalist Carl Arrington, who appears in the documentary, that Ike had abused her for years. Arrington did not foreground the resultant piece with Turner’s allegations; instead, he simply reported them out within a story about her overall return to the scene. Turner says her aim in going to People was to put the story out so she wouldn’t have to talk about it again; if people knew why she and Ike were no longer associated, she thought, maybe she could finally move on with her life. Naturally, that’s the opposite of what happened. Not even her memoir satisfied the appetite for her most gut-wrenching stories; for decades since 1981, interviewers have asked Turner about Ike. (He died in 2007 at the age of 76.)
Now, at the age of 81 and living in a château in Switzerland, Tina Turner hopes to exit gracefully from the entire scene of her celebrity—and her husband Erwin Bach, an executive producer of the film, is helping her achieve this last public wish. Rather than trying to undo or edit the history of how her story has been told, Tina makes fans and observers another offering: Experience the full range—musical, emotional, and spiritual—of a rock-and-roll legend. You won’t regret it.
— Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow, and the Long, Uphill Road to a Reckoning
— The Fall of Armie Hammer: A Family Saga of Sex, Money, Drugs, and Betrayal
— Justice League: The Shocking, Heartbreaking True Story of the #SnyderCut
— Jimmy Kimmel Breaks Down in Emotional Interview With Ady Barkan
— Sharon Stone on How Basic Instinct Nearly Broke Her, Before Making Her a Star
— Oscar Nomination Snubs and Surprises: Delroy Lindo, Aaron Sorkin Strike Out
— Raya and the Last Dragon’s Kelly Marie Tran Believes Her Disney Princess Is Gay
— From the Archive: Who Stole the Oscars?
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.