It's Taylor trailer time: Get your first glimpse of 'Miss Americana'

Netflix

It’ll premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, but the debut of Taylor Swift’s documentary Miss Americana in theaters and on Netflix is a little more than a week away. Now, we’ve got our first trailer for the project, which reveals its main thrust: Taylor Swift’s political awakening.

“Throughout my whole career, label executives would say, ‘A nice girl doesn’t force their opinions on people,'” Taylor says in a voiceover. “I became the person everyone wanted me to be.”

Then, Taylor discusses the period she dropped out of sight following her reignited feud with Kanye West. “Nobody physically saw me for a year, and that was what I thought they wanted,” she notes.

It was during that time, Taylor says, that she re-thought her entire approach to fame, which prior to that point had been all about trying to get people’s approval

“I had to deconstruct an entire belief system: toss it out and reject it,” she says. “It woke me up from constantly feeling like I was fighting for people’s respect. It was happiness without anyone else’s input.”

We then see Taylor telling her team, “I want to do this. I need to be on the right side of history,” followed by news reports about how she’d finally decided to speak out politically. You may recall that happened in 2018, when she endorsed Democratic candidates in her home state of Tennessee.

“I feel really good about not feeling muzzled anymore,” she says. “And it was my own doing.”

Or, as Taylor told Variety this week, “Obviously, any time you’re standing up against or for anything, you’re never going to receive unanimous praise. But that’s what forces you to be brave. And that’s what’s different about the way I live my life now.”