Film asks: How does America solve a problem like Britney?

This Valentine’s Day, America finds itself struggling with the notion that it might have wronged one of its sweethearts.

We’re not perfect, even though we think we are.

It’s been about two weeks since “Framing Britney Spears” made its debut on Hulu. The

New York Times documentary takes a look at the latest struggles of the international superstar who has spent the past 13 years under a court-appointed conservatorship that gives her father the power to control the star’s money and, it appears, many aspects of her life.

The singer now finds herself in a legal battle to remove those constraints, and some of her fans find themselves mobilizing in the form of the Free Britney movement, picketing in support of her efforts.

The program tells Spears’ story, starting as a little girl on “Star Search” all the way through the cancellation of her Las Vegas residency at the MGM. It touches on her mental state during the height of her celebrity and the lows of her personal life, when her marriage fell apart and she was unable to see her young sons. Most important, it points an accusatory finger at how the pre-#MeToo world stood by and watched a young woman’s life spiral out of control — with many stopping to figuratively pop some corn while watching the show.

It all seems rather gossipy, a family’s dirty laundry aired by wags and benevolent meddlers. But in the case of Spears, maybe we as a society are more involved in her current situation than we ever should have been.

Never mind the ambition, the stage-parenting and the starmaking industry that Spears jumped into since she was in grade school — that’s the price of celebrity, and that’s all on her and her family.

We didn’t really get involved with this kid until 1999, with her debut video for “Baby One More Time.” The video opens to a row of desks and a girl waiting for the bell to ring, and then cuts to Britney — in a very sexy iteration of a kid’s school uniform — singing about being lonely and wanting to be, well, hit one more time. That anybody thought this was a good idea seems skeevy in today’s climate, but skeevier still is the idea that such an idea was OK about 20 years ago.

That’s not to say it was OK with everybody. The documentary includes a report in which Diane Sawyer tells Spears that the governor of Maryland’s wife said she wanted to shoot her because she was such a bad role model for girls.

And it’s not to say that Spears was the first teenager to soup up her kidgear in a sexy way. The problem is that there are girls you take home to mom, and there are girls who take mom around the world on a private jet. And which one of those does the average American 13-year-old girl want to be?

Spears launched her career by blurring the lines between women and girls, and we had no idea what to do with that. Nobody was sure whether the headliner was female empowerment or objectification. And maybe that’s why she was treated like a punk kid instead of a rock pioneer. We’ve covered a lot of ground since those days — about mental health, privacy, talented young people making life choices without the world pointing and laughing.

“Framing Britney Spears” is a reminder of where we were in the late ’90s and, more important, that even as a society we don’t know everything we think we do.

Chris Pizzello / Associated Press Pop star Britney Spears has been in a protracted dispute with her father, Jamie Spears, about a conservatorship that has controlled much of her life and money. A new documentary places her in a fresh and complex light, sparking support from fans.