The very first thing you notice about the young Ukrainian ballet superstar Sergei Polunin is his deep set of piercing eyes which somehow seem to unnerve him as much as the people he stares at.  He cuts a striking figure shirtless displaying a profusion of tattoos and his taut sinewy body with perfect abs clad in figure hugging tights looking every inch the ‘bad boy of ballet‘ that he is now universally recognized as. Of course, Polunin wasn’t always like this as this new profile from filmmaker Steven Cantor starts with clearly showing an eager-to-please charming little boy growing up in his native Ukraine.

When his parents became aware that their only son had this exceptional talent, they decided that they would do everything in their power to ensure that he would get to fulfill his potential.  His mother moved them to Kiev to enroll Sergei in the best Ballet school, but as this was very expensive both his father and grandmother went abroad to get better work in order to pay the fees.  Polunin progressed so well that the next step at the age of 13 years old, was the prestigious Royal Ballet School in London, but this came at heavy price.

With his mother unable to stay with him because of visa restrictions and his father and grandmother still toiling away to pay the bills for so long, the family never ever recovered, and when his parents ending up divorcing it greatly impacted the teenage Polunin, unable to speak a word of English,  just threw himself into his studies. 

It paid off handsomely as in 2009 when Polunin was just 19 years old he became a first soloist at the Royal Ballet, and the just a year later he became their youngest ever principal. At the same time. he also partied hard into the night pumped full of drugs and drinks. He did this with the same dogged determination as he danced seemingly as a means to ‘find himself’,  but also at the same time to deal with his depression that had really started when his family split.

Then just two years later he shocked the whole world by announcing his immediate resignation and with that he walked away from one of most prestigious positions in Ballet.  He claimed to have felt trapped and that the artist in him was suffering.  However, an angry Establishment rounded on him for his petulant behavior and to his dismay, despite his enormous talent, Polunin could not find any other European Ballet company prepared to offer him roles.

Back in Russia he was welcomed with open arms and ended up becoming a principal dancer with The Stanislavsky Ballet Theatre and performing all the classic roles with the celebrated Igor Zelensky who became his mentor. That however ended after a little over a year and again with an abrupt departure by a frustrated and unhappy Polunin declaring  he is going to now give up ballet for good. Before he does however he plans a dance choreographed to Hozier’s Take Me to Church and filmed by David Chapelle.  Then when the video of this goes viral (over 16 million hits so far) it introduces Polunin to whole new wider audience outside of ballet and gives the dancer the incentive to think that he has still a need to dance, and better still, for the very first time, seems to give him …. still only 26 years old …..some real hope.

Watching him dance, whether it be in Kiev’s national theater as Spartacus, or in flesh colored tights in Chapelle’s video, is electrifying, and you don’t have to be a balletomane to appreciate that Poulin is a sheer genius.  As much as his bad boy label will always stick to him, so will the observation that at long last we have a male dancer as good as the great Rudolf Nureyev himself.

Towards the end of the documentary Poulin makes a real effort to reconcile with his estranged family, but the one major omission from the movie is the lack of any personal relationship, and there is not even a hint of a girlfriend or boyfriend. Asides from this Cantor’s portrayal of Polunin’s troubled soul is very sympathetic indeed, and he goes out of his way to show that for once the real toll of becoming a world-class dancer was not just on his body, but much more on his life itself.