Female artists are so dominant in popular music right now that it’s jarring, at first, to recall the world that Ally Pankiw’s new documentary, “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery” (streaming on Hulu), recreates. It’s the mid-1990s, not a great time to be a young woman in the public eye. The shape of your body, the attractiveness of your face and the relative appeal of your sexuality were all fair game for TV hosts and politicians.
And if you were a musician, you had more hurdles to clear, as the film’s subjects explain. They would know. It feels as if an army of women making music in the late 1990s appears in “Lilith Fair”: Sheryl Crow, Suzanne Vega, Erykah Badu, Jewel, Liz Phair, Paula Cole, Natalie Merchant, Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris, Lisa Loeb, Shawn Colvin — I could go on and on. Culled from more than 600 hours of never-seen archival footage, the film examines the three summers of Lilith Fair, the groundbreaking all-female music festival that ran from 1997 to 1999.
But Lilith Fair felt like an outlier in the world of music. At the time, several of the women explain, prevailing wisdom suggested that you couldn’t play back-to-back female artists on the radio because listeners would change the channel. It was risky to put two women on the same bill for a live show. And the way you’d be talked about as feminist, or pushy, or siloed — it could be gross and undermining and isolating.
The linchpin of the film is Sarah McLachlan, the singer-songwriter who conceived of and led Lilith Fair through 134 dates across 54 cities. She tells the main story, explaining why she hatched the idea for the festival and how she brought on other artists. Along with others, she also explains how the festival both changed the world and challenged ideas about women’s place in the music business.
“Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery” is a largely uncritical celebration of a phenomenon that — as the 22-year-old star Olivia Rodrigo suggests at the start of the film — many younger people may not have even heard of. The film doesn’t shy away from the fact that Lilith often functioned as a punchline or a lightning rod of controversy in culture, a blank canvas onto which people projected their fears or prejudices without experiencing it directly.
For those of us who remember it, or who came of age listening to its artists, watching the movie is a bit like settling into a warm bath. A lot of it consists of naming artists, showing a bit of their appearance at the festival, and letting them say how wonderfully supportive and unusual the atmosphere was. It’s fun to watch, but it can be repetitive.
Certain aspects of the film stand out for how they comment on the cultural moment the festival represented. One is the mention of Woodstock ’99, which took place in July 1999, about a month before Lilith Fair’s last date. Crow played the other festival, which fostered an infamously toxic environment, with many arrests and a number of allegations of sexual assault. She noticed the difference in ambience when she rejoined the Lilith tour, and in the film, the juxtaposition is stark.
Another notable aspect is broader. Several times, interviewees like Jewel, McLachlan and Phair, who were still in their 20s and early 30s during the Lilith tour, speak about the profound effect of performing with seasoned artists like Harris and Bonnie Raitt. At times the older stars guided the younger artists, providing advice especially to McLachlan in her role as the face of the festival.
I don’t think they use the word “mentor,” or at least it’s not conspicuous. But there’s a sense of the great generosity needed for one generation to bring members of the next into the world and give them a space to be themselves. And as the film points out, new younger artists — some still in their teens — played the smaller stage at Lilith, too: women like Christina Aguilera, Dido, India.Arie and Nelly Furtado.
Art only works if it’s shared in community and handed down from older people to younger ones, and it’s at its best when artists get to collaborate. Every night at Lilith Fair ended with an encore in which all the artists went onstage and sang together. It’s easy to see a world you might want to live in, too.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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