Who Does Madonna Wanna Be?

By RICHARD CORLISS

No one could ever blackmail Madonna. Indiscretions other stars would pay to suppress she is happy to exploit. A stormy marriage to Sean Penn, a brisk fling with Warren Beatty, the teasing hint of a tryst with Sandra Bernhard, MTV's banning of the gender-blender Justify My Love video: no problem. Every fresh outrage is a soaring career move. Last week Madonna made the front page of the New York Daily News by giving a chatty-sassy interview to the gay biweekly The Advocate. She gets tabloid treatment -- just as much as she wants -- in slick magazines. New York, People, Vanity Fair, she's done them all in the past month. And what has she done to earn this cover coverage? She overexposed herself (nothing new there). She took Michael Jackson to the Oscars (Stop the presses!). And she put together a docudrama of her 1990 Blond Ambition concert tour.

O.K., this is news. Truth or Dare offers an ace manipulator's self-portrait, unmediated by interviewers or pundits. Raw, raunchy and epically entertaining, this is pure, adulterated Madonna. Giving her all to simulated masturbation in the Like a Virgin number. Blithely stripping for the camera. Calling Beatty a wimp (more or less) because he is sensibly shy of her camera. Recalling some erotic nurse play with a childhood girlfriend. Gagging when Kevin Costner says her show was "neat." Consummating an intimate relationship with a bottle of Vichy water. Two hours of dishing and dissing in relentless, bathroom-mirror closeup.

The film, directed by video phenom Alek Keshishian, trails Madonna through Japan, North America and Europe as she pursues her hobby (rock star supreme) and her full-time job (do-it-yourself mythmaker). This is show biz, remember, where image elbows achievement out of the frame. Madonna knows this. She is the most self-aware, perhaps the sanest, of celebrities. So Truth or Dare doesn't dwell on what she has done. We know she has done plenty, done well and, in her AIDS-relief fund raising, done good. Keshishian shows us what Madonna thinks she is -- and what she, driven by her acute instincts and awesome nerve, might next choose to be.

A great performer, for starters. More than Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep, Madonna is the modern movie star because she has created her own roles: boy toy, Marilyn Monroe avatar, Penthouse pinup, sly feminist, scandal magnet. With docile avidity, the world has eyed this procession of Madonnas, each one an incendiary variation on the last. The gag is that despite some fine screen work, she has never quite made it in Hollywood, a failure of the moguls, who haven't figured out how to channel her charisma. She is not one to wait for other people to do her a favor. So Truth or Dare serves as a kind of blueprint for alert auteurs. She says, in effect, "Here's a Me -- not the real me, not all of it, anyway, but a movie-marketable Madonna -- that you guys can play with. Now get to work and make me a hit."

Work and play, lovers and family are the touchstones of Truth or Dare. Madonna sweats bullets to make her tour sensational, and she bustles behind the scenes too. She leads a group prayer before each concert; she bastes the broken hearts of her staff. Like many strong actress-singers, Madonna has a fervent gay following, and most of her dancers are gay. To them she is a doting den mother, turning stern only when things get bitchy. It's a tough job, juggling dozens of fragile egos along with her armored one, but she has balls enough for everybody. The crew is her moody brood, and she is Mama Madonna, single parent.

She is also, the movie says, an adoring daughter, honoring her father with a fond, wet rendition of Happy Birthday. But in the family scenes, among many others, one gets the sense of an actress playing, so coolly, with a moviegoer's expectations. Watch the star at the grave of her mother, who died when Madonna was five. Dolled up in modified Marilyn, she kneels and kisses the tombstone. Then she says she wants to be buried next to her mother and stretches out, comfy, on the ground. What's going on here? Is this a cemetery or a campsite? Spontaneous emotion or a piece of avant-garde performance art for the mass audience? The flummoxed viewer is at a loss to decide. Madonna gives great mind jobs.

Cinema verite, the genre Truth or Dare fits into, is supposed to mean movie truth, but it's all about exhibition. The camera doesn't reveal who people are; it shows what they are trying to be. If they are adept at using themselves and others, they will shine. And Madonna -- who has played more roles in a decade of camera courtship than Katharine Hepburn has in 60 years of movie stardom -- radiates luxe, wit and common sense playing a semi-real character based on a fiction named Madonna.

Hard to say if this is movie Truth. But it's spectacular Dare.