Who Does Madonna Wanna Be?

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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."