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Something must have told the universe the Australian public was hungry for biopics of our Aussie pop divas, because we drank up the episodes of Netflix's Kylie Minogue multi-part series in May, and hopefully the same attention gets lavished on this stand-alone film about Tina Arena, hitting cinemas this week.
If these things were judged by singing ability alone, it would be Tina Arena with the Netflix multi-part series, but the fact that it isn't is exactly what this biographical doco unpacks.
Arena's story is a heart-breaking but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and reinvention.
As friends and family recall in Adrian Russell Wills's doco, the young child of Sicilian migrant parents was heard singing at a wedding and a friend of a friend put the family in touch with a very connected singing coach.
This led to Arena appearing on and becoming one of the most popular regular cast members of the children's singing show Young Talent Time that ruled the airwaves in the 1970s.
Appearing on the show, then becoming one of its most high-profile young stars, was a life-changing experience, though Arena recalls the school bullying as much as the hard work and the opportunities.
In those awkward mid-teen years, Arena made the decision to quit the show and concentrate on finishing school and having teenage friendships, and the film shares an emotional clip of the farewell episode, and an interview with her friend and mentor Johnny Young, only recently departed.
This isn't, for once, a sad tale of childhood exploitation, though many will feel there's a rough moment listening to Young describe his approach to de-ethnicising Arena's real name of Filippina, down to the more palatable Tina.
The middle third of the film follows the young lady wanting to re-establish herself as a singer, and the mis-steps along the way, choosing songs that she felt weren't right for her, though I want to say on the record here that her 1990 Strong as Steel is an absolute banger and sold quite well at the record store I worked in at the time.
But the older and reflective Arena interviewed for this film also notes that this young woman was looking for her identity in all the wrong places, and took some time to notice that it was all male voices dictating who she should be and look like.
In the media rounds for the cinema release of this film, Arena has been able to share her thoughts on Ralph Carr, her husband and manager across this early part of her adult career, and the recently lifted suppression order placed over his 2023 rape conviction that the filmmakers would have been unable to include in the interviews.
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Perhaps this explains the reticence in the woman being interviewed on camera for the film - I came away not necessarily with a sense of who Tina Arena is as a person, but with a stronger respect for her talent and achievements.
She comes across as sincere, but painted with a theatrical camp sensibility, and while she says in the film that she doesn't want to "be fake because if I'm fake the audience would see that", I think when you've been performing since early childhood, there's an element of performance that's impossible to drop.
But then, I'm not reviewing Tina Arena the singer or Tina Arena the person, I'm reviewing the film, which is engaging and appropriately deifying for a woman recently inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame (by Kylie), acknowledging 50 years of performance.
Canberra's National Portrait Gallery plays a sweet cameo part, commissioning Georges Antoni's photographic portraiture of Arena and giving the film its big emotional ending.
