'Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down' can be difficult to watch. Why you shouldn't look away

“Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” announces its intentions from the start: This documentary is not fooling around.

The film, directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West (“RBG”), opens with Giffords, the former U.S. congresswoman from Arizona, walking among flowers placed in front of the U.S. Capitol as memorials to those lost to gun violence.

Giffords, of course, is a victim of gun violence. A gunman trying to kill her shot her in the head on Jan. 8, 2011, during a meeting with constituents in front of a Tucson Safeway. Six people were killed. The shot that tore through Giffords' head damaged her brain; she has worked at recovery ever since.

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Giffords' initial recovery, which Mark Kelly videotaped, is hard to watch

Cohen and West don’t show any of this at the outset. They go from the walk among the flowers to opening credits that are a montage of Giffords’ life leading up to her shooting, including her congressional win.

“Gabby was a star,” former President Barack Obama says. It’s a fairly conventional start.

And then Cohen and West cut to Giffords in a hospital bed, days after the shooting. She is in a Houston hospital, her head shaved, staples lining parts of it. Requests for simple movements are met with a blank stare.

It is stunning. Throughout the media coverage of the shooting, and there was plenty — at one point NPR, among others, reported that Giffords had died — we heard updates of her condition. But it’s all opaque, a description without a picture.

The film provides the pictures. And they are difficult to watch. Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, now a U.S. senator, began videotaping her recovery at the outset. He thought that maybe 10 years later she’d want to know what she went through, he explains.

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This gives the audience a unique look at her progress, which is slow but mostly steady, and frequently heartrending. The injuries caused by the bullet ripping through her brain left her with aphasia, a difficulty in speaking. Sometimes Giffords can’t come up with the word she wants. Other times she substitutes the wrong word, or gets stuck on it. In one segment she keeps using the word “chicken” for everything.

Cohen and West move back and forth between past and present. There is footage of the shooting’s aftermath, and a look at the victims, in particular Christina-Taylor Green, who was 9 when she was killed.

We hear about Giffords and Kelly’s plans to have a family; she was scheduled to have an in vitro procedure on the Monday after the Saturday she was shot.

We also learn of her plans to run for Senate. “She had the energy and ambition, I think, to have gone really far in politics,” Obama says. Cut to her neurosurgeon talking about her limitations. “Gabby’s injury was behind what most of us could imagine,” he says.

Now we can imagine it, thanks to the film. And that’s important. But this isn’t just a long slog through a painful recovery. It’s a celebration of Giffords’ spirit — she remains passionate, enthusiastic and kind of goofy — and the work she’s done since the shooting to try to prevent gun violence. That this is an uphill battle is not lost on her, but she’s nothing if not persistent.

Music, like David Bowie's 'Space Oddity,' provides a lot of the film's joy

Music provides a lot of the joy in the film. While Giffords has difficulty speaking, she sings with seeming ease (which is sometimes the case with people who have aphasia, we learn). In one scene Kelly is commanding a space shuttle mission as Giffords has brain surgery; David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” plays behind the contrasting footage.

The lyric “Tell my wife I love her very much/she knows” takes on new meaning as Kelly sings it from the shuttle.

Kelly, of course, eventually runs for U.S. Senate from Arizona and wins. (He is up for reelection this year.) Giffords works tirelessly on a campaign commercial for her husband, struggling to make the words come out right.

And yet she persists.

There’s a funny scene in which Kelly practices his first speech in front of the Senate before a wickedly funny and detail-oriented critic: Giffords.

It is, of course, impossible not to think of what might have been had Giffords not been shot. Every victim of gun violence inspires that feeling. But Cohen and West capture her work since, both to recover and on behalf of others. The Tom Petty song that inspires the title is apt: won’t back down, indeed.

'Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down' 4 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Directors: Julie Cohen, Betsy West.

Cast: Gabby Giffords, Mark Kelly, Barack Obama.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic material involving gun violence and some disturbing images.

Note: In theaters July 15.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down' review: Tough, but worth it