Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story review – a crash course that could have gone further

Before E.L. James, there was Jackie Collins. A self-proclaimed feminist, the sex-positive romance novelist, screenwriter, and actress saw a highly successful career from the late 1950s until her passing in 2015. Now, Laura Fairrie's documentary attempts to take a deeper look at the woman with gained a reputation for being as mysterious and sensual as the characters she wrote.

Fairly standard in its format, Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story melds together talking heads from family (notably her famous older sister, Joan), friends and colleagues with archival footage (a mixture of television appearances and gloriously dated home videos) to track Collins’ life chronologically.

Shy and demure at a young age, as articulated via her meticulously kept diaries, she quickly learned to weaponise her femininity, edging her way into Hollywood circles by association rather than star power and discovering that life on the peripherals of stardom could lead to greater success than life as a B-movie actress.

Observing the intricacies and scandals of Hollywood hierarchy, Collins began to translate them into books, fictionalising the sordid glamour and with it creating an empire. Her novels, which were abundant with sex and sleaze, ended up selling over 500 million copies around the world, with Hollywood Wives her most commercially successful.

Though it makes for a good crash course on the glitzy yet turbulent life of this female trailblazer, Lady Boss – like Collins herself – has a hard time securing itself as definitively feminist. There’s no denying the impact Jackie had in terms of bringing conversations about female pleasure to the forefront, but as the women in clips from a 90s talk show point out, her often formulaic work quickly fell behind the times. Yes, her characters were unapologetically sexual and, yes, they helped to instil sexual courage into a new generation of women, but they weren't particularly complex.

Though Collins' most successful books were released in the throes of second-wave feminism, the documentary makes little effort incorporate what could be really compelling discussions about gender equality and sex positivity. Collins’ brand of feminism feels watered-down and reductive, akin to the much ridiculed “girl boss” phenomenon of modern times; repeatedly we're told that she believed “girls can do anything” and hated the double standards of men and women, but rarely did her activism go any further. She merely dipped her toes in conversations about equality, individualism and patriarchal dominance, careful not to be too politically radical, and the documentary follows suit; its more interested in her love affairs than exploring these criticisms through a modern lens.

Collins’ personal life and her works of fiction were inexplicably linked, a point emphasised in the film by carefully interwoven real-life stories from friends and lines taken from some of her most popular books. She was a controversial figure – a business woman, a brand – and though it may be a stretch to deem her a feminist by twenty-first century standards, there’s no denying that she was, indeed, a boss.

Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story is now in cinemas and on digital platforms.