Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker. Rating unavailable.

Beyond the Lights officially qualifies as the year’s guilty pleasure you don’t have to feel so guilty about. That’s because, despite its occasional slips into melodrama and soap-opera antics, writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s movie digs below the glitzy surface to ask some hard questions about how women are treated by the recording industry.

So, yes, Beyond the Lights is a somewhat predictable update on The Bodyguard, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a bootylicious Rihanna/Beyoncé-style megastar named Noni whose videos feature her, as someone delicately puts it, “face down, ass up”. When a cop named Kaz (Nate Parker) is assigned to guard her hotel room and then saves her from a suicide jump off a balcony, he sees the overwhelmed girl beneath the hyperprocessed pop star. They start to fall for each other, but his “Officer Hero” is as bad for her image as she is for his aspiring, Obama-style politician.

What gives this story heft are scenes like the film’s prologue, when the younger Noni sings a searing a cappella version of “Blackbird” in a youth talent contest in working-class Brixton. When she’s named runner-up to a cutesy tap dancer, her overbearing, cockney-tongued mother (Minnie Driver) demands she throw the trophy away. Driver’s stage mom from hell remains a force throughout the film. Mbatha-Raw also brings the fire and, once the lavender hair extensions and fake nails come off, some real dimension and emotional soul-searching.

For his part, Parker has to flash his magnificent abs a lot, but he brings depth to the role and creates real heat with Mbatha-Raw.

Beyond the Lights sometimes has trouble deciding whether it abhors or worships the pop world it portrays: Kaz’s sexy skyride in Noni’s jet and a day trailing her around to photo shoots seem more like wish fulfillment than a critical look at the music biz that has her hornily gyrating over rapper Kid Culprit (Richard Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker) on-stage.

Still, Beyond the Lights has the visual chops and the catchy, booty-shaking R & B tunes to pull it all off—even when it can’t see for the rump-shaking stars in its eyes.