‘Sia: Nostalgic for the Present’ Review: A Concert Performance Film from 2016, but It Channels Sia’s Mystery and Power

When Lady Gaga first ascended to supernova celebrity, with the release of “The Fame” in 2008, there was a time when she kept her face hidden — under the elaborate masks she wore in videos, and even in interviews, for which she would also show up masked. It was a highly elaborate act of camouflage, but the ruse worked. She was only 22, yet she created an aura of mystery around herself, conjuring “Lady Gaga” as a larger-than-life character. (When you heard that she was really Stefani Germanotta from New York City, you would think: Really, who is that?)

Sia, born in Australia 10 years before Lady Gaga, had a career that predated hers as well. But by the time Sia hit her solo stride in the late 2000s, she didn’t simply borrow from the Gaga mask playbook. She concealed her face to the point that the mystery became part of who she was. “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present,” which opens tomorrow and is showing in select theaters for a limited run, is a performance film that was originally created for Sia’s 2016 Nostalgic for the Present tour, and in the entire movie you never once see Sia’s face.

She’s right there in front of us, standing and singing on a platform at stage left, hidden under a half-blonde, half-black wig with bangs that hang down to her lips. There’s an oversize white bow on top of the wig, and she wears a white dress that resembles a nurse’s uniform from the early ’60s. Sia’s greatest songs, like “Unstoppable” and “Titanium” and “The Greatest,” are anthems of strength, power, fortitude, invincibility, and watching the movie it’s fascinating to behold how her facelessness feeds that quality. She’s an abstract figure, a pair of lips singing, and this creates the sensation that the power she’s singing about doesn’t emanate from her. She’s channeling a force larger than herself — the rising specter of feminine triumph. She’s merely the vessel.

I’m not entirely sure what the two-tone wig means (the duality of woman?), but everyone in the movie wears a version of it: the dancers, the actors (Kristen Wiig, Paul Dano, Ben Mendelsohn, Gaby Hoffman) who each appear in one dance video, as well as the choreographer, costume designer, and offstage crew members. They’re all wearing the wig, which looks like the fabled New York black-and-white cookie turned into a fashion emblem of talismanic power. “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present” is basically a 75-minute-long series of dance videos that were designed to be projected onstage during the tour, with live performers mirroring the movements in the videos. The featured star is, of course, Maddie Ziegler, the whirling dervish of a child dancer who pranced and flung and gyrated her way through three celebrated Sia music videos; she was 14 when the Nostalgic for the Present tour unfolded.

This weekend, if you go to “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present,” what you’re seeing is a 10-year-old movie (and a promotional one at that), so it’s severely lacking in the shock of the new. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a greatest-hits compendium. But though Sia’s last major hit was a decade ago, she had such an intuitive gift for crafting powerfully infectious pop songs that it’s hard to understand why she hit a wall. I think it might have had something to do with the mask/wig/hiding thing. Pop stars, especially the ones who have extended careers, are people who have a primal desire to put themselves out there. Whereas Sia clearly had a primal ambivalence about that. She was a camera-shy exhibitionist.

In “Nostalgic for the Present,” her voice is commanding, ringing out with those soul inflections that make her sound like Amy Winehouse if Winehouse were being produced by Giorgio Moroder. The dance performance that’s at the heart of the film is the sort of thing that felt transgressive back then, but now it looks like something out of a 2010s nostalgia reel. Maddie Ziegler, who was born in Pittsburgh and got her start on “Dance Moms,” flings her body around with a kind of airy gymnastic aggression, and she specializes in facial contortions meant to express the underlying ferocity of Sia’s music (and are sometimes just there as psycho flourishes to mess with the audience). Ziegler is like a mime crossed with Daryl Hannah in “Blade Runner,” but there’s also a touch of Sid Vicious to the way that she’ll mug and curl her lips like a teenage brat who’s gone off her meds.

The hits remain sublime. I retain a special adoration for “Chandelier,” a song of hedonistic assertion and underlying ambivalence that, for me, is filtered through its brilliant use as the centerpiece of the Broadway version of “Moulin Rouge!” I’m writing about Sia as if she had gone away, but as someone who loves her music, I see no reason on earth why she couldn’t now enjoy a comeback as ferocious as the one that Gaga had with “Abracadabra.” She wouldn’t even need to come out from behind the wig; that would play like gangbusters on the Grammys. But she’d have to rouse herself to do what she used to do: create a dance hook as shiny and fierce and glorious as titanium.