Zeberiah Newman‘s Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter is not your typical exercise in rise-and-fall ’90s celebrity nostalgia.

Then again, Susan Powter was never your typical ’90s celebrity. From a distance of over three decades and coming personally from a demographic that was probably her least lucrative, I find it hard to explain exactly what kind of celebrity she was. There was surely a period of several years in which Powter’s spiky, platinum hair and almost cartoonishly assertive energy were ubiquitous. She was an infomercial juggernaut, a bestselling author, a regular talk show guest and a personality so aggressive she almost couldn’t be parodied, but she was visible enough that she was parodied anyway. Her message involved healthier eating and a physically fit lifestyle, but I couldn’t quite explain it in more depth.

Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter

The Bottom Line

Captures a complicated life with empathy.

Release Date: Wednesday, November 19 (Los Angeles); Friday, November 21 (New York)
Director: Zeberiah Newman
Producers: Zeberiah Newman, Michiel Thomas, Leah Turner
1 hour 27 minutes

Powter was everywhere and then she was gone, but in contrast to so many of her fin de siècle peers who have received documentary treatment in recent years, there was no controversy, no disgrace, no run of late-night punchlines left in her wake. She wasn’t a joke or a pariah; she was simply gone, as if she had agency in her own recusal from a world in which she had appeared to be so comfortable.

What’s fascinating and often successful about Newman’s documentary is how proudly uninformative it is, and I’m really intrigued by the idea of how it might play to viewers who have no clue who Susan Powter was. Newman sketches out the basic details of her emergence as a self-care guru. There are a few talking heads providing context or explanation, and those talking heads — Ross Matthews, mostly — are easily the worst part of the documentary, or at least the most superfluous part.

Where Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-vérité glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic — a distinction I certainly appreciated. There’s no condescension, no treatment of Powter as a cautionary tale. We see her exist, and it’s an existence that makes her relatable in a way I definitely never found her in the ’90s.

Where is Susan Powter in the documentary’s present? Las Vegas, and if you told your average Gen X-er or millennial that Susan Powter was working there now, the response would probably be “Sure, that makes sense,” with the assumption that she had a nightly empowerment show at, like, the Excalibur or something. One can imagine Powter prowling a stage, shouting catchphrases into a tiny microphone, bringing up tourists from the audience for tough love and then hugs.

Except that, as the documentary begins (Newman plays very loose with time), Powter is actually delivering for UberEats. Hair grown out, aged naturally, she’s unrecognizable — except that when she starts to talk and she locks onto Newman and cinematographer Michiel Thomas (a former colleague of mine, in the interest of full disclosure), it’s with the same intensity you might imagine the pre-fame Powter brought to an aerobics class and mid-fame Powter brought to her talk show.

She treats her living situation — which reached its nadir at a crime-ridden welfare hotel on the edge of The Strip — with candor, not shying from the ironies of a workout guru whose regular workout became daily multi-mile marches in the Vegas heat or a healthy-eating guru shopping for meals at the 99 Cent Store. She explains the bad business decisions that put her in this position but doesn’t dwell, nor does the documentary dwell, on her absolute low point.

Most of the documentary is spent with Powter in a very slightly improved condition. She somehow got enough money to live in a grungy but acceptable apartment and she’s able to afford some fresh vegetables. But she also knows she’s one dental emergency or car repair away from disaster. She is, in this respect, no different from most Americans — though unlike most Americans, she’s able to start writing a memoir knowing she can get it into the hands of her former Simon & Schuster editor, in the hopes that she’s one or two breaks from something resembling a comeback.

You will have questions. You will want to know which parts of her departure from the spotlight were her own choice and which were related to financial mismanagement. You will want to know about her three children. You will want to know about which parts of her financial struggle have been caused by stubbornness and pride, when presumably there’s a nostalgia circuit that could have supported her over the years and may, in fact, be what helped her rise from her lowest point. You’ll want some discussion of her version of wellness in the ’90s and how it aligns with a 2025 version of wellness. Is she relevant today or clinging to the past? You will have questions.

Newman, though, is more interested in capturing moments in Powter’s life as she’s living it, rather than telling viewers what we probably want to know. It’s intimate and not informative.

The documentary thrives when it captures her going through boxes of her old possessions, rescued from a storage locker in New Mexico; having a panic attack when her Prius is on the verge of breaking down; or, later, when she finds herself in Los Angeles for an exclusive interview with People and an experience with a stylist takes her from elation to depression.

It works best when it conjures a fly-on-the-wall experience of being Susan Powter today, making her an unlikely version of an Everywoman. Even more intriguingly, the documentary turns her into an avatar for all things contemporary Las Vegas, embodying the real-life challenges experienced by real-life Las Vegas residents who exist with a tawdry version of glitz and glamour that’s on the horizon but not quite accessible. When Powter is simply part of the Vegas landscape, with no trappings of her prior fame, it’s captured beautifully.

Finding Susan Powter struggles when Newman doesn’t trust the fly-on-the-wall approach: when he lets Matthews, who met Powter once on a cruise ship, have talking-head segments despite a lack of personal connection; when he lets several other people in Powter’s very limited sphere have direct-to-camera conversations that violate Powter’s perspective, which should be the documentary’s exclusive perspective.

The documentary isn’t pure vérité, because it’s an acknowledged part of the story — whether it’s the production’s role in helping Powter get her belongings from the storage facility or the appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer and catalyst for the project in ways that aren’t fully explained. Curtis’ interactions with Powter are so pure, and illustrate the two women’s similarities in such revealing ways, that the contrivance of their meeting ceased to bother me.

What I liked most about Stop the Insanity is what’s likely to make it a tough sell to audiences who have devoured films about so many of her former contemporaries. It doesn’t say if Powter, as a guru, was right or wrong. It doesn’t tell you if Powter in her current form is well or unwell, healthy or unhealthy, and it definitely doesn’t offer reassurance that, after the camera stops rolling, she’s going to be OK. It doesn’t exploit her celebrity or sensationalize its demise. As the title suggests, it merely finds Susan Powter and lets her tell her story as she’s living it.

As somebody with little previous investment in Powter’s story, I found that a much more interesting approach than a version of the film that might have satisfied a larger audience.