Kylie, the new three-part documentary that launched on Netflix on Wednesday and has been making me verklempt ever since, is great in every way it’s possible for TV to be. But on the basis of the first two and a half episodes, a couple of things jump out: Kylie’s almost superhuman ability to stay cheerful in the face of intense provocation, and the extraordinary rudeness she had to tolerate from interviewers back in the day.

Here’s Michael Parkinson in 2004, grinning like an alligator and asking her a question considered totally fine at the time: “What about children? You’re 35 now, leaving it a bit late aren’t you?” And a few years later, Cat Deeley, asking roughly the same question, albeit slightly more diplomatically, right after Kylie had emerged from chemotherapy for breast cancer. Nice work, guys!

Anyway, never mind that. This gorgeous documentary is a correction to the recent slew of terrible hagiographies (Melania), weaselly half-measures (David Beckham) or empty vessels (Victoria Beckham) that skirt around their subjects, instead offering us a profile in fame that apparently took its maker, Michael Harte, two years to finish and features all the people you most want it to. At the heart of it is the enduring oxymoron of Kylie Minogue herself, a person who, even after all these years, appears enigmatically normal, opaquely straightforward, aggressively nice and still, despite everything, a lovable dork from the suburbs of Melbourne who became one of the world’s most famous women.

I had forgotten a lot of this. I don’t think about Kylie much these days. I did once, however. It’s a generational thing, obviously; Kylie was the first concert I ever went to, Wembley Arena, 1990, at the age of 12, with my best friend, Sophie, and her dad. We were those pale, weedy kids on the news – kids from ’80s and ’90s Britain who had never seen sunshine and told owl-eyed reporters we watched Neighbours twice a day, at 1.30pm and 5.35pm, bewitched by the strapping Australians and their back yard pools. Rewatching footage from that era is a heart-thumping exercise – with the added hilarity of Jason Donovan popping up as he is now (sardonic, grizzled) to share his reminiscences over old footage.

God, there’s the mullet; there’s the big Minogue teeth; there’s Anne Charleston as Madge in the background. And here’s 57-year-old Donovan swearing and struggling with himself as he admits he was jealous of Kylie back then, a man by turns burned out and hilarious, like something out of Beckett. Being dumped for Michael Hutchence – “look, I don’t have anything against Michael” – still has him fighting back tears. “Love hurts, mate,” he says to the interviewer and I want to say, Jason! We know! We were all there for it! “I don’t think I can say any more, to be fucking honest.”

The star of the show, however, is Dannii Minogue, whose face during her interviews describes various states of disgust as she talks about the way her sister has been treated over the years. Dannii, who appears from the documentary to be steelier and more outspoken than her sibling, has had an absolute gutful of all of it and as she talks, you are reminded that during that era in which everyone was taken in by Russell Brand, Dannii wasn’t.

The other star is Nick Cave, whose description of Kylie’s psychotic teenage fanbase when the two collaborated on Where the Wild Roses Grow (“these monstrous, awful teenage girls”) is perfection, as is his stunned recollection of what it was like for all the miserable bastards in his band when Kylie walked into their lives. “She was like this beam of light,” says Cave, “with this incredibly positivity. I don’t think we’d ever met anyone in our lives that liked life. This bold brightness.”

For anyone who grew up with Kylie, it’s a lot, all of this, and I’ve had to keep pausing to look up things such the 1989 video for Wouldn’t Change a Thing (“I-I-I-I wouldn’t change/I-I-I-I wouldn’t change”) and have a quiet moment with myself. In the background, meanwhile, are Ron and Carol, the Minogue parents, who it would be impossible to love more, not least because Ron, a retired accountant, gave Kylie some very sound advice when she first started to make money (invest in property) and now she owns half of Melbourne.

But if Kylie is a piece of nostalgia, it is also about how tough certain types of guilelessness can be. “Oh, gosh!” says Kylie. And “absolute tosh!” The only time she swears is when she realises she has been drawn into discussing the late Hutchence and, upset, swears in frustration. After decades of global fame, invasive tabloids and two cancer diagnoses, she’s still here, reminding us who we were when we were young and pushing forward – as Carol Rumens once wrote about Diana, “an eager girl again, dressed for the ball” – scattering joy as she goes.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist