DIANE WARREN: RELENTLESS - Mark Reviews Movies

Diane Warren: Relentless, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 9, 2025

Diane Warren has become the answer to some trivia in recent years. She keeps being nominated for Academy Awards for her songs but, to this date, has yet to win one in that category. Well, Diane Warren: Relentless gives her chance to secure yet another nomination in about a year, with a song written for this documentary that ultimately makes the case she should finally receive that award. She might have another nomination shortly after this review is published, too, so the movie might do that part of the job before its own award hopes are fulfilled or broken.

There is a bit more to Bess Kargman's movie, but one can't help but feel a bit of skepticism about the project when considering its final stretch. It recounts Warren's various Oscar nominations and losses, numbering 15 at the time of writing, with a special emphasis on recent bids. We watch her filled with some optimism about this year finally being the one, before someone else wins.

What's particularly strange about the movie and Warren's participation in it is that the awards talk is when they really come across as passionate. The rest is the usual biographical documentary, following the course of its subject's life from childhood until the present. The movie doesn't seem too interested in those details, either, taking us from one song to the next, one interviewee praising Warren for her talent, and more of the same until Kargman gets to her final argument.

Warren herself is pretty closed off as a subject, too. That's another observation people have about her, because the conversations are always about getting the next song made. Cher, for example, notes that Warren calls her every day at the same time, and whenever she is writing or has finished a song, that tune is regularly "the best" or "one of the best" she has written. Some of that is just sales technique, because others point out how aggressive Warren can be about getting the right singer to record one of her songs. They compare her to a car salesperson who refuses to be turned down, and that she's often right, giving music artists some of their biggest hits, is part of why people like her.

The big contradiction, eventually addressed by the documentary, is that Warren doesn't necessarily seem to like herself that much. That's not entirely accurate, but she is vocally insecure about her skills as a songwriter. One would think the music charts and, yes, awards over her more than four decades in the business, not to mention her own accomplishments on the actual business side of the industry, might prove those doubts wrong, but that's not the case. Something is driving Warren for more and more acknowledgment, which she seems less and less likely to accept.

Warren and the people closest to her know from where that stems. It has to do with her relationship with her mother, who was strict, unaffectionate, and never supportive of Warren's dreams to make music. The movie tells us this over and over, and to be fair to Kargman, it's not as if the filmmaker's subject has much else to offer when sitting down for interviews or being filmed doing her work.

In fact, the work itself almost doesn't matter here. Sure, we get the short list of Warren's most notable hits, with subtitles ensuring we know which of the songs were specifically nominated for an Academy Award, starting with DeBarge's "Rhythm of the Night," taking us through her first Oscar-nominated song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship, bringing us to one of Cher's personal favorites "If I Could Turn Back Time," and on and on. When asked how she writes, Warren scoffs at discussions of "process." When Kargman's crew tries to watch her sit down at an electric keyboard, she asks everyone to leave her alone.

This is fair, obviously, because Warren doesn't necessarily owe the filmmakers or anyone an inside look at her doing her job, especially one as personal as this. On the other hand, it doesn't make for an insightful or compelling look at the songwriter beyond the basic facts of her career, what others have to say about her, the songs themselves, and how often those tunes have received awards and reached some prominent position on the popular charts. Warren's participation in the movie about her eventually feels secondary, and Kargman's approach doesn't appear to take her subject's resistance into account.

Instead, the movie itself, much like us, seems to keep expecting more, but more isn't coming from Warren. That's her prerogative, to be sure, and at least her story—as a kid who kept being told she couldn't succeed, a young woman who kept at it, a savvy businessperson who understood the importance of making her business her own, and a person who has dealt with long-unspoken pain and trauma—is broadly worth hearing. Diane Warren: Relentless simply isn't an engaging means of telling that tale.

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