t feels so right that Kylie Minogue has finally got her own Netflix documentary. Her career spans nearly four decades, but Kylie doesn’t feel like a simple victory lap. It’s intimate, thoughtful and unexpectedly emotional, a portrait of an artist who has spent most of her life in the spotlight while keeping her truest self just out of reach.

Director Michael Harte splits the series into three parts, tracing Minogue’s remarkable journey from a fresh-faced soap star on Neighbours to global pop royalty, taking in the career highs that made her a household name and the personal setbacks that shaped her. He weaves together archive footage, candid interviews and stories from the people who know her best, including her sister Dannii Minogue, former co-star Jason Donovan and collaborator Nick Cave, and the result feels both sweeping and genuinely intimate.

What the filmmakers get right is refusing to reduce Minogue to glitter and nostalgia. Yes, we happily revisit the hitmaking years, the gold hotpants and the pop perfection of Fever. But the real emotional heart of the story lies in the subtle moments, where Minogue reflects on rejection, public scrutiny and illness with a disarming honesty.

The Glastonbury section is among the most affecting. Minogue had been due to headline in 2005 when her breast cancer diagnosis arrived mid-Showgirl tour. The footage of Coldplay performing ‘Fix You’ in tribute at that year’s festival lands with real poignancy. She returned to the Glastonbury stage in 2010 as a guest during the Scissor Sisters set, performing their collaboration ‘Any Which Way’, before finally taking her own headline slot in 2019, 14 years after cancer took the first one away. It’s a quiet, three-part arc that the documentary handles beautifully.

She also opens up here about the previously undisclosed recurrence she faced in 2021. These are the documentary’s most powerful moments, not because they’re dramatic, but because of how clearly you can see both her vulnerability and the composure she uses to hold it together.

The section on Michael Hutchence, the legendary front-man of the 80s rock band INXS, is handled with similar care. Minogue speaks about their relationship, one of the most formative of her life, with real grace, never saying a bad word about him despite a difficult ending. The series acknowledges how deeply it shook her, including her retreat to Paris afterwards, where she stayed with a friend who is still close to her today. But it moves on too quickly. The impact of Hutchence’s death and the way his influence shaped the emotional depth of her music, deserved more space. For someone who clearly mattered so much to her, the treatment feels thin.

That’s the documentary’s main frustration. It’s occasionally too polished, smoothing over entire creative eras in favour of a tidy narrative. Two more episodes covering the years between 2005, 2021 and now would have given her talent for reinvention the room it deserves.

The gap is most obvious when the documentary reaches her late-career resurgence. ‘Padam Padam’ gets its moment, rightfully so, given that the song introduced her to a whole new generation and led to her 2024 Grammy win, but you’re left wanting more of the story behind it.

Still, Kylie never tears the icon down for the sake of cheap revelation. What it gives you instead is the real woman who was always there, warm, resilient, self-aware and quietly funny. By the time the credits roll, you’re left not just with admiration for the fact that she survived, but also because of how she keeps evolving. In an industry obsessed with spectacle, her greatest achievement might be that she’s always stayed unmistakably herself.