Accidental Genius

The hits have already been hard enough by the time Amy Goldstein’s documentary “Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl” gets to its biggest gut punch. Set mostly between the years of 2014 and 2018 — the “lost years” of Nash’s pop career, basically — the film follows the multi-talented singer and performer as she attempts to not only resuscitate her career, but to keep it viable and independent in an industry that has never had much interest in that sort of thing. An instant star at the age of 18, Nash went from literal obscurity (she worked in a fast food joint, lived with her parents, and posted her music on MySpace) to traveling the world as an in-demand artist in the span of mere months. A desire to grow creatively led to her label dropping her, and Goldstein’s film opens with Nash fighting hard to come back on her own terms. It’s a tough story, but an old one, and audiences will have to wait for half the documentary to zip by — and it does! Nash is very easy to invest in, even in ...