Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love To Love You: Donna Summer’ on HBO Max, A Sensitive Doc Exploring the Public and Private Selves Of The Queen Of Disco

Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams (The Apollo) and Brooklyn Sudano, the singer’s daughter, Love to Love You: Donna Summer arrives on HBO Max after making its premiere at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival and at South by Southwest. Named for one of her biggest and most enduring hits, the doc explores Summer’s early life, her 1970s arrival as “The Queen of Disco,” and how stardom put new demands on someone who was by nature extremely private. The life and music of Summer, who passed away in 2012, was most recently celebrated on Broadway with Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, which ran for almost 300 performances.    

LOVE TO LOVE YOU DONNA SUMMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: In 1975, the world fell in love with the sound of Donna Summer having fun. “Love to Love You,” which she co-wrote with songwriters and producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, was a slow-burn disco jam defined by Summer’s vocals and overt sensual moans; it became her first international hit, and set up her ascendance as “The Queen of Disco.” (The incandescent disco grooves of “I Feel Love” and “Last Dance” would soon follow.) But as Love to Love You: Donna Summer emphasizes, it was a success somewhat at odds with how the singer saw herself. “‘Love to Love You’ was becoming this world symbol of freedom and liberation,” Summer says in a recording heard in the doc. “Things would begin to happen. People would rip their clothes off and throw them on stage – bras, underwear – and I didn’t know, like, it was gonna be that racy.” An innate understanding was formed, where The Queen of Disco was a role, and Donna Summer was just a person.   

“A lot of her life revolved around privacy and secrecy,” Brooklyn Sudano says in Love to Love. And Sudano, who directs here alongside Roger Ross Williams, is seen making phone calls to the people who knew her mother professionally and probing her two sisters and other family members for a sense of the person behind the star. Born Donna Adrian Gaines in Boston in 1948, Summer’s talent as a singer was manifested in church before she lit off to New York City in the late 60s, singing in a blues band (Janis Joplin was an influence) before eventually landing in Munich at age 19 for a major role in a production of Hair. Donna Summer became a star in Germany, the collabs with Moroder and Bellotte followed, and soon it was time for America to greet its new disco queen. But as Sudano says, “Mom was complicated. She struggled with her fame, her image, even love.”

Love to Love utilizes a broad cross-section of archival footage to tell its story. Summer was omnipresent in the late 70s – she is seen in vibrant performance both in Europe and America, being disarmingly charming on Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show, and making glamorous appearances at record release parties and award shows, flashbulbs popping and paparazzi trailing her limousine. But the doc also includes rare home movie footage shot by Summer herself, much of which plays against her public persona in revealing a natural quirkiness and mischief-making sense of humor. And as they sift through career mementos and their own memories, Brooklyn Sudano and Bruce Sudano, Summer’s collaborator and husband for over thirty years, reckon with the woman the world knew versus the mother and wife they loved.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There are parallels in the lives and long careers of Donna Summer and Dionne Warwick, as Love to Love You and the recent Don’t Make Me Over make clear. (Warwick appears briefly in Love to Love, presenting an award to Summer.) And like Love to Love, the recent music docs The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart and The Velvet Underground benefit mightily from access to Universal Music Group’s vast copyright and catalog holdings.

Performance Worth Watching: Songs like “Love to Love You” and “I Feel Love” came to define not only Donna Summer’s career but a cultural moment, and that’s explored here from the doc’s title, through its stirring opening sequence, and on to a collection of fantastic color footage shot at New York’s Studio 54, where the inclusive club scene was driven into new states of euphoria. “I remember when ‘I Feel Love’ came on at Studio 54,” Elton John says in Love to Love. “You just stopped in your tracks. ‘WHAT is this?’ People screamed. It just went on and on and on, and you didn’t want it to stop. It sounded like no other record.”

Memorable Dialogue: Throughout Love to Love, whether in media interviews or recordings personal to her family, Donna Summer stresses how her true self existed in the space between her private life and the performative aspect of her work. “I was always a comedian. I was always a clown. So becoming ‘Donna Summer,’ the character, I didn’t feel very sexy at the time, so I just assumed it as a role. This time that I spent away from home, away from the mindset that I grew up in, away from what should be, away from how I should be – is what has made me what I am.”

Sex and Skin: This doc is most interested in the discourse surrounding sex and sexuality in the 1970s, and how Donna Summer both accessed that conversation and felt continually apart from it. Included is an extended recording studio take of the simulated sounds of pleasure in “Love to Love You.” But also included is home movie footage of a cartoon striptease, shot by Summer herself, where she assails the manufactured nature of her sexy persona to the howling delight of her friends off camera.

Our Take: There’s a searching, at times somber quality to Love to Love You: Donna Summer. The superstar singer died in 2012 at 63 after a battle with lung cancer, and from the perspective of Brooklyn Sudano, there was perhaps not enough time to learn about how her mom saw herself once the glitter ball stopped turning. Sudano, her father Bruce, her two sisters, and her mom’s siblings all admit a certain detachment from Summer and the emotions she kept private; it is said that her most raw moment of vulnerability only arrived in the days before her untimely death. And in that sense, the recurring close-up of Donna Summer’s eyes in Love to Love – it’s a piece of footage from around 1975; she’s waiting for direction from someone off-camera during a video shoot – becomes a valuable tool for illustrating the singer’s inner life, and how it existed concurrently with her popular emergence. For viewers, the doc is revealing as a biography, as well as a sound exploration of celebrity as it existed in a previous era. But just as often, Love to Love You: Donna Summer feels made for the family themselves, as a means of finally, truly seeing into the woman who they adored but always knew kept herself to herself.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Love to Love You: Donna Summer is a music doc as oral history, crafted and told by the folks who knew its subject best while still longing to know more. But it also tracks the mechanisms of starmaking, the highs and lows of which really haven’t changed that much in the five decades since Summer was first crowned the “Queen of Disco.”

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges