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Yes, wildly, in this intimate, harrowing story of a pop diva’s career and illness, a surprising number of minutes is dedicated to her playing her managers a YouTube video of Our Johnny covering the Beatles’ Help and admiring the husky, hoarse quality of his voice.

Her voice has always been such a finely tuned instrument, she explains, that she always felt jealous of the performers who could party and smoke after (or before) a concert. Singing fills Dion up and makes her feel alive. “Before I got really hit with SPS,” she says, “my voice was the conductor of my life. You lead the way, I’ll follow you.”

It’s especially cruel, having heard this, to witness, in the film’s final passage, what singing does to her now.

Over the course of filming, Dion only left her home three times. The final outing was to a studio, where she struggled to get a new song down on tape for the first time in three years. Eventually she does it. But the act stimulates her brain to such a grand degree it triggers a spasm.

Taylor’s cameras capture the process of her doctors laying her rigid body face-down, dosing out relaxants and warning that “going into a crisis” is possible. Her body won’t co-operate and her wide eyes are terrified. “If I can’t get stimulated by what I love …” an embarrassed Dion begins after the 40-minute episode is behind her. The end of the sentence hangs in the air.

The sequence of clips that plays next are short. They show a younger Dion not belting out an enormous chorus but simply walking on stage. The non-contextual editing choices come into relief: they weren’t showing us what she did in her career, they existed to show us how she could move in her body – and the power and confidence it gave her to have control over herself.

I Am: Celine Dion is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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