What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

Liz Garbus's Netflix documentary delivers the most intimate portrait of Nina Simone's genius and anguish, drawing on 100 hours of archival footage and personal diaries to reveal how her classical piano training and ferocious civil rights activism fueled—and ultimately fractured—her artistry. The film's unflinching look at her bipolar disorder and the financial exploitation she endured is more revealing than the broader career overviews in #6 Summer of Soul. Simone's 1964 song 'Mississippi Goddam,' performed here with blistering fury after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, anchors the narrative with a 3% approval rating from white radio stations at the time—a statistic that underscores her uncompromising voice.