Katy Perry film gets personal

By Preston Jones

McClatchy Newspapers

Making a serious documentary about aggressively over-the-top pop star Katy Perry might seem a bit like trying to grab hold of a cloud. Yet, directors Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz manage to balance the outlandish with the painfully personal in “Katy Perry: Part of Me,” a 3-D concert film/ biography hybrid.

Cutforth and Lipsitz have been here before, with last year’s similarly positioned “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.” In that film, as in this briskly paced outing, the goal is twofold: Sate the rabid fan base with beautifully photographed concert footage, and fashion a mythic narrative as a white-hot career continues its ascension.

“Part of Me” tags along on Perry’s 2011 international arena tour, doggedly following her across the country and around the world. It’s an eye-opening account of the toll maintaining such a grueling pace exacts not only on the star of the show, but her support staff as well.

Intercut with the gaudy, flashy set pieces from her “California Dreams” tour — the 3-D technology is put to good use here, immersing viewers in bubbles, feathers and foam — are interviews with the pop star, Perry’s family and friends, and her early defenders.

To Perry’s credit, she allows the filmmakers several revealing peeks behind the cotton-candy facade, including a heartbreaking sequence late in the film as her high-profile marriage to comedian Russell Brand collapses.