It’s about two sexual-abuse survivors telling their stories with unprecedented frankness, illuminating not just the sickness of a legend, but the pervasiveness of a crime that exists at every level of society, and that hides behind abuser-friendly notions of despoilment and shame. It will draw viewers by listing the alleged misdeeds of a pop icon - one who was arguably bigger than the rest, even Bill Cosby - and perhaps inspire many of them to view him through a darker lens, but it is ultimately not about Jackson. The documentary, which airs on Sunday and Monday night, feels like a conversation-realigning milestone. Leaving Neverland arrives on HBO two years after the first wave of #MeToo allegations, which exposed an array of outrages and crimes by men (and a handful of women) in power.
It’s a radically empathetic film about the resonating impact of sexual abuse, as well as the personal and social forces that conspire to keep people from talking about it in public. The result is no mere account of a celebrity scandal, nor is it content to be a portrait of a disturbed musical genius who survived his own abusive childhood (at the hands of his father and manager, Joe Jackson). Dan Reed’s two-part, four-hour documentary Leaving Neverland, in which former protégés of Michael Jackson describe years of molestation, scars the mind with words.