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‘Diane Warren: Relentless’ Review: Doc Portrait Digs Into the Offbeat Personal Iconoclasm Behind All Those Mainstream Songs

The documentary 'Diane Warren: Relentless' is an engaging portrait of a top writer who has come to be a mogul but still acts like a song hustler.

Despite having a self-owned song catalog whose worth is estimated at up to a half-billion dollars, and despite famously having 15 Oscar nominations and a lifetime achievement award, Warren still maintains the aura and attitude of a street hustler, as if every new tune she’s pitching to the studios or the stars is the one that’ll finally catch her a break. Very, reports Clive Davis, who describes her as miserable the night her Lady Gaga collab lost to Billie Eilish, even though he supposes she should have been celebrating the live telecast performance that was meant to inspire millions of assault survivors. The psychological complexity doesn’t end there: There’s probably some kind of Freudian explanation for why Warren was long since rich enough to own her own gleaming Hollywood office tower, and retreats daily to work on songs in a writing room so disheveled that even a tunesmith at the bottom of the latter might fear to enter.

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