Two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple follows the soul singer Sharon Jones from the moment she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer to her first performance after her recovery. Jones’s manager postpones all promotional activities for the new album, and for the six-month duration of the chemotherapy she moves in with a dietician girlfriend. The members of her backup band The Dap-Kings see their incomes slump overnight, and the trumpeter decides to accept a well-paid job in talk show host Jimmy Fallon’s house band. At the lowest point during chemo, Jones even loses her eyebrows, but this gutsy woman – known as the female James Brown – gradually pulls herself back up again. She’s thrilled to be invited onto The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she shows off her bald head on the cover of The Village Voice with the headline “Soul Survivor.” After one more little setback, just five weeks after the end of her course of treatment, she’s back onstage dancing and singing: “I’m alive!”