The Line Between Persona and Person Softens Over Time

Read Time:5 Minute, 28 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Peaches Goes Bananas
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Genre: Documentary, Music, LGBTQIA2S+
Year Released: 2024
Runtime: 1h 13m
Director(s): Marie Losier
Where to Watch: opening in select theaters December 3, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: A documentary built over nearly two decades asks the filmmaker to commit not just to a subject but also to the gradual shifts that come with age, loss, reinvention, and the unpredictable changes life throws at someone living unapologetically. PEACHES GOES BANANAS embraces that view and uses it as a core strength, capturing Merrill Nisker — better known as Peaches — at various points where confidence, exhaustion, humor, ambition, and tenderness collide. Director Marie Losier isn’t interested in shaping Peaches into a conventional documentary figure. Instead, she lets the footage accumulate naturally, turning the film into an extended conversation between two artists as they attempt to understand one another across changing landscapes, careers, and personal histories.

Peaches has built a reputation in the music world, particularly for work that confronts gender, identity, power, and bodily autonomy through performance art. Concerts are infamous for their intensity and sexuality, often staged as deliberately confrontational experiences meant to challenge how audiences think about expression and ownership of the body. Losier’s camera recognizes that the stage persona is only one piece of the story. Rather than presenting Peaches through a single lens, the film expands its focus to cover quieter moments, private conversations, family bonds, and the periods of regrouping that occur when the lights come down. Some of the most striking sequences are those in which Losier steps back and lets stillness take over, allowing viewers to see the person beneath the glitter, chaos, and anthems.

The documentary benefits from its handmade, collage-like aesthetic. Losier blends 16mm footage, candid digital moments, and fragmented concert material into an experience shaped by texture rather than chronology. That approach mirrors Peaches’ own philosophy: life and art are inseparable, constantly feeding one another. The film doesn’t try to clean up the pandemonium. Instead, it highlights the rough edges, trusting that authenticity often comes from what isn’t refined. The editing reinforces this idea. Aël Dallier Vega stitches moments together with a rhythmic pulse that feels spontaneous yet intentional, especially in sequences where Peaches’ concerts erupt with sweat, and a kinetic determination that commands the frame.

Of all the threads woven throughout the documentary, the relationship between Peaches and her sister stands out as the emotional core. Their bond shifts the film from portrait to testimony, revealing how connection can reshape the harshness of constant touring and pressure. These scenes add a dimension the public rarely sees — one where family becomes a grounding force rather than a background detail. Watching Peaches care for her sister highlights a vulnerability that contrasts with the unapologetic ferocity of her stage work. These moments deepen the film’s impact, giving the audience a sense of the stakes behind the music and the costumes.

Following a subject for seventeen years is a monumental choice, but it can create a production with more insight than coherence. While the documentary is rich with feeling and personality, the focus sometimes drifts. Viewers unfamiliar with Peaches’ full career might find themselves wanting a clearer throughline to anchor the vast archive of performances and personal footage. The documentary isn’t directionless, but its commitment to capturing sensation over explanation means that certain ideas — Peaches’ creative philosophy, the evolution of her feminist position, her relationship to fame, or even her place in LGBTQIA2S+ cultural history — feel touched on rather than explored. As a result, the portrait is evocative but occasionally elusive.

The concert sequences remain a highlight, not only because they’re spectacular but because they reveal the extent of Peaches’ physical commitment. These performances are intense reminders of the labor that goes into cultivating a stage presence that looks effortless. Losier captures this with a patience that respects the craft rather than turning it into spectacle for spectacle’s sake. There’s a level of access here that reinforces the trust between filmmaker and subject. Even in moments when the narrative loosens its grip, the connection between the two artists lends the film a steady emotional tone.

Where the documentary succeeds most is in presenting a subject who has spent 20 years rejecting the demand to be defined: Peaches has built a career through defiance — cultural, political, and artistic. The film frames that defiance not as rebellion for its own sake but as a lived philosophy. Her art is about disruption, but it’s also about care, connection, and an ongoing search for how to exist in a world that constantly seeks to reduce identity to marketable parts.

PEACHES GOES BANANAS is honest about its priorities. It’s a compelling portrait with incredible access, striking imagery, and a genuine pulse — but it also occasionally feels pulled between documenting and interpreting. What it captures, though, is unmistakably real: an artist who reinvents herself constantly, refuses complacency, and channels every version of herself into work that shapes the performance landscape of feminist punk and queer expression. This release stands as an important record of an artist who remains difficult to categorize but impossible to ignore. It’s immersive, intimate, scattered, and sincere — an appropriate reflection of a figure who has always lived on her own terms.

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[photo courtesy of FILM MOVEMENT]

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