Paris Hilton spends much of her adult life performing a persona she built as a teenager, and this film follows her across a world tour of appearances, DJ sets, and hotel rooms to find out what sits underneath it. Director Alexandra Dean gets access most profiles never do: Hilton driving at night because she cannot sleep, home movies from childhood, and long, unguarded conversations with her mother and sister. The film's center is her account of being sent to a series of boarding schools, including one in Provo, Utah, where she says she experienced physical and psychological abuse, a story she says she has never told publicly before. Friends and family fill in the years around it, from the sex tape that made her tabloid-famous to the businesswoman she became afterward. The contrast between the practiced blonde-heiress act and the person Dean's cameras catch off duty, tired, angry, occasionally in tears, is where the film does its real work.