Rad­i­cal artist Nan Goldin takes on opi­oid barons in the All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed trailer

Laura Poitras goes where the fight is. The doc­u­men­tar­i­an fol­lows injus­tice wher­ev­er it may lead, whether that’s the Mid­dle East (for her Al Qae­da expose The Oath), Hong Kong (where hunt­ed whistle­blow­er Edward Snow­den sought refuge in Cit­i­zen­four), or the streets of New York (as in Ter­ror Con­ta­gion, her pan­dem­ic-pro­duced short includ­ed in the omnibus film Year of the Ever­last­ing Storm). But her lat­est and per­haps most acclaimed fea­ture brings her some­where rel­a­tive­ly for­eign to her polit­i­cal­ly charged fil­mog­ra­phy: the past.

Today brings the first trail­er for All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed, which begins with a look back into Nan Goldin’s Man­hat­tan. The leg­endary artist and sub­ject of the film got her start in the down­town scene of the ​’70s, a cre­ative­ly fer­tile haven for artists and odd­balls of all stripes, bull­dozed by a com­bi­na­tion of drugs, AIDS, insti­tu­tion­al hos­til­i­ty, and the rav­ages of time.

The trail­er shrinks the grand com­par­i­son made by the film to micro­cos­mic pro­por­tions, trac­ing a line from the death of a cul­tur­al moment to the mass casu­al­ties inflict­ed by the Sack­ler fam­i­ly, prof­i­teers reap­ing the rewards of the opi­oid epi­dem­ic. With Poitras and her crew tag­ging along, Goldin and her band of impas­sioned activists wage a non­vi­o­lent war on the high-pro­file muse­ums and gal­leries still accept­ing dona­tion mon­ey from the Sack­lers and san­i­tiz­ing their name by carv­ing it into the arch­es of these tem­ples to art.

In her review from the pre­mière out of the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, Lit­tle White Lies’ own Leila Latif expressed some ambiva­lence about the film’s ten­sion between its vital con­tent and far-reach­ing approach: ​“The mate­r­i­al and the life from which the film draws is not just good, it is utter­ly extra­or­di­nary, which makes it a shame that the result­ing film feels less than a sum of its parts,” she wrote. ​“Each of these sub­jects would eas­i­ly war­rant a sin­gle ded­i­cat­ed doc­u­men­tary, but togeth­er there is a slight vague­ness of purpose.”

If noth­ing else, the trail­er con­veys the com­pul­sive watch­a­bil­i­ty of Goldin on cam­era, a fiery and eru­dite icon­o­clast who won’t be stopped in her pur­suit of jus­tice for those too late to save. Equal parts gal­va­niz­ing and dev­as­tat­ing, it’s sure to be one of this year’s cru­cial films, non­fic­tion or otherwise.

All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 23 Novem­ber, and then the UK on 27 January.