. The film celebrates Amy Ray’s and Emily Saliers’ status as among the first figures in the rock world to come out while enjoying gold and platinum success, as the duo did in their initial late ’80s and ’90s heyday.
The feel-good aspects are plentiful enough that it comes as sort of a rude reawakening late in the film when the filmmaker presents a pained segment that’s a sort of anthology of pop-culture moments in which the so-called “lesbian folk-rock duo” was the butt of a lot of jokes, usually based in the idea that the Indigo Girls represented something no man or straight person would want to go near.
Critics have not always been kind to the Girls, either, as there’s another cringe-y scene in which Ray and Saliers are asked to read aloud from a 1989 New York Times review in which Jon Pareles wrote that “earnest pretentiousness has new standard-bearers” and “each Indigo Girl has a slightly different style of pretension.