Review: ‘Princess Shaw’ picks up good vibrations via YouTube

“Presenting Princess Shaw” is often like watching a reality TV show sprinkled with fairy dust. But with a unique narrative conceit and a highly root-worthy underdog at its center, the movie stands apart as a kind of feel-good, audio-visual experiment.

Israeli filmmaker Ido Haar started out to make a documentary about an eclectic array of singers and musicians with YouTube channels whose online output is skillfully — and secretly — edited by musical prodigy Ophir Kutiel, a.k.a. Kutiman, into stirring video mashups. But the more time Haar spent around talented singer-songwriter Samantha “Princess Shaw” Montgomery, a New Orleans retirement-home nurse with a traumatic past and a penchant for stardom, he found her so singularly compelling he decided to make her the film’s focus.

Haar and his cameras followed the warm, candid, hope-springs-eternal Montgomery over the course of nine or so months, shooting her at work and home, singing at a sparsely attended open mic night, attempting to audition for TV’s “The Voice” and, most important, recording her emotional video diary entries and original song stylings for her YouTube fans. Until this point, the reddish-pink-haired 39-year-old thinks she’s just part of a random, possibly go-nowhere doc about YouTubers.

Montgomery eventually learns, however, that the filming has all been leading to the YouTube release of Kutiman’s instrumentally enhanced version of her soulful song “Give It Up,” which she had first posted, like all of her tunes, a capella. Fortuitously for Haar, he was shooting Montgomery in Atlanta, where she’d traveled to check out the city’s growing music scene and visit long-lost cousins, at the exact moment the video dropped.

Sharing Montgomery’s shock and joy — and honor — when she realizes what’s been done with her precious song is a wonderful moment, one that anyone who’s ever won their own personal “jackpot” will especially enjoy. If Montgomery considers the covert nature of Haar and Kutiman’s joint plan untoward — as some viewers might — she never goes there.

Throughout the movie, Haar cuts to footage of Kutiman, who makes his home on an Israeli kibbutz, at his computer surfing for talent and stitching together YouTube clips of Montgomery’s and other amateur musicians’ work. He often utilizes a vivid split screen effect in these mixes to highlight each artist’s contribution.

No sampling fees or rights ever change hands, an issue that goes underexplored here and would seem like a potential red flag for the future Princess Shaws out there — if not Shaw herself.

Although Montgomery opens up about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend — and of her mother’s head-burying complicity — she seems to maintain a decent relationship these days with her ebullient, now-supportive mom, who we meet only via cellphone chats. On the other hand, Montgomery offers no real personal views on her sexuality beyond what we see of her breakup with a longtime girlfriend. Given how generally frank the singer is, more on that front would seem in order.

The film culminates with Montgomery’s joyous visit to Tel Aviv to perform her songs in concert with the orchestral support of Kutiman and his fellow musicians. The result is a heart-swelling collaboration that bridges countries, cultures and the various corners of cyberspace.

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‘Presenting Princess Shaw’

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes

Playing: Sundance Sunset Cinemas, West Hollywood; also on VOD