Miss Americana, a documentary about Taylor Swift directed by the Emmy winning filmmaker Lana Wilson, premiered on January 23, 2020, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Netflix released it worldwide on January 31, 2020, eight days after the premiere. The title comes from "Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince," a song on her 2019 album Lover.

The filmmakers described it as a raw and emotionally revealing look at Swift during a period of transformation, as she learned to accept her role as a songwriter, performer and woman. The film follows her through the making of Lover in 2019, the period after the Reputation era, and it includes studio footage of songs being written and recorded with her collaborators.

A central sequence shows Swift deciding to speak publicly about politics for the first time. In October 2018 she posted her support for two Democratic candidates in Tennessee's midterm elections, breaking the silence she had kept on political subjects since the start of her career. The film shows her discussing the decision with her father and her team, some of whom urged her to stay quiet, and her insistence that she wanted to be on the right side of history.

The documentary also features "Only the Young," a new song Swift wrote after the 2018 election results, which played over the closing credits and was released the day the film arrived on Netflix.

The release came during a turbulent stretch in her career. In June 2019, music executive Scooter Braun had acquired the master recordings of her first six albums, the dispute told in Battle of Masters, and in November 2019 she had been named Artist of the Decade at the American Music Awards, told in Artist of Decade. Months after the film's release, with the pandemic stopping her planned concerts, she released folklore, told in Folklore.

The film documents Swift's move from staying out of politics to speaking publicly about voting and civil rights. It showed a side of the singer's working life that she had rarely opened to cameras, from songwriting sessions to the business decisions that shaped her public image.