Miley Cyrus made an appearance at the Tribeca Festival over the weekend, and her fans were uncharacteristically unhappy about it. The reason was a misunderstanding that, in part, dates back to the festival’s decision to drop “film” from its official billing a few years back, in order to better embrace elements of TV, podcasts, and music that Tribeca has come to incorporate. Cyrus, fresh off the release of her latest album Something Beautiful, was on hand to premiere an accompanying visual album (which is really to say, an anthology of music videos for every track on her new record) at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. She would appear at the event for an in-person Q&A, which is where the confusion really set in.

Because public tickets to a Miley Cyrus “live” in-person event at a well-known music venue were sold on Ticketmaster, some fans bought them (sometimes on the secondhand market at a huge mark-up) thinking they would be getting a full-on concert. It was a letdown, then, for some in the audience to realize they were sitting down to watch a 53-minute visual album (Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful) followed by a question-and-answer session; a few even heckled Cyrus about the misunderstanding when she appeared on stage. She gamely sang a few a capella bars of “The Climb” to oblige them.

The strangest thing about this incident (beyond the combination of the festival using such a misleading venue and some ticket-buyers seemingly not reading anything about the event they were attending) is that Cyrus would be considered so detached from the film industry that a substantial number of people wouldn’t even consider that she might be involved in a movie-related event, rather than an impromptu live show. Cyrus never became a big movie star, per se, but she was a TV lead for 100 episodes of Hannah Montana and toplined four narrative movies, only one of which was the Hannah Montana spinoff film. She even met her future husband (and later ex) Liam Hemsworth on the set of The Last Song, which was a decent-sized hit back in 2010. Cyrus has only become a more practiced performer since then. So what happened to her big-screen career?

The simple answer is Bangerz happened; Cyrus’s 2013 album spawned several hits that crossed her over from Disney star to all-around pop phenom, and so figuring out her next movie vehicle likely took a backseat to managing a resurgent music career. Still, big music careers sometimes embolden pop stars to try their hand at acting, and Cyrus had already done it for years, so it’s a little surprising that Cyrus hasn’t starred in a single movie (or even appeared in many where she didn’t play herself) since before the Bangerz era.

Actually, a technicality almost gives lie to that statistic. Cyrus had one movie drop the same year as the Bangerz album, though hardly anyone knew it was happening. Even today, So Undercover remains both almost universally accessible – it’s the rare movie that’s streaming on Hulu, Prime Video, Peacock, the Roku Channel, Tubi, and Pluto TV, among others, as if its rights owners simply deposited the file on their virtual doorsteps – and virtually unseen. The film was shot in 2010, set for release in 2011, and then mysterious changed distributors several times before trickling out slowly and erratically, premiering in the United Arab Emirates in late 2012. After bouncing around the U.S. release schedule, it was finally released direct to video stateside in February 2013, about half a year before Bangerz came out.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call So Undercover a Rosetta Stone for Cyrus’s movie career, but it’s definitely at odds with her subsequent career adventures in the 2010s. Like other unsuccessful attempts to throw a kid-appealing star into the world of campus teen comedies (see the appalling Sydney White with Amanda Bynes), it’s pitched toward a juvenile sense of college life, where catty sororities swap in for mean girls and cafeteria hierarchies. Echoing her Hannah Montana duality, Cyrus plays Molly, a young private investigator, usually partnered with her dad, who takes an undercover assignment from the FBI (?!) to secretly protect a senator’s daughter living in a sorority house. Molly’s a rough-and-tumble regular girl, not a glammed-up queen bee; she gets a brief tutorial in youth slang and affect from a couple of people who look a decade older than she is, and quickly finds herself an outcast in the preppy, ditz-heavy sorority house. (No word on whether her tummy’s turning and she’s feeling kinda homesick.)

Very little about So Undercover is interesting; it’s easy to see how it could get lost between Miley’s apple-cheeked Hannah Montana era and her looming young-adult rebellion, not least because it feels like it’s written from a child’s conception of college (and, for that matter, law enforcement). It’s a not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman type of movie with a narrow window of appeal. But the element that sticks out given Cyrus’s subsequent career is how her persona depends on a rejection of glamor; she’s positioned as sort of a blander, JV Sandra Bullock from Miss Congeniality. That’s part of The Last Song, too, an attempt at everygirl relatability that translate to a tentative, stilted onscreen presence. The contrast with her music videos from Bangerz and beyond, including the new Something Beautiful clips, is striking; in her videos, Cyrus is pure physical confidence, strutting and writhing her way through old-fashioned video-queen dexterity. In So Undercover, she doesn’t even run convincingly. She can hit those requisite Disney marks but she can’t really physically inhabit the space of a non-sitcom. By comparison, she looks about two feet taller in her music-video work.

Cyrus did make a couple of more traditional movie-career gestures in the 2010s. She played Demi Moore’s daughter in the cross-generational indie LOL, and became one of the final actresses to go through the once-obligatory rite of passage of appearing in a Woody Allen project with the Prime Video miniseries Crisis in Six Scenes. The latter isn’t technically an Allen movie, but it plays like a distended version of one, and Cyrus acquits herself well enough as a young sorta-radical who hides out with a couple played by Allen and Elaine May, delivering some amusing snipes about Allen’s age. Supposedly Allen cast her because his kids watched Hannah Montana and he saw some workable comic timing.

But mostly, Cyrus has stuck to old-fashioned entertainer stuff since her peak movie years: music, but also SNL performances, hosting a few SNL-adjacent New Year’s shows for NBC, sometimes popping up as herself in this or that movie or TV show. (She’s in Drive-Away Dolls briefly, not precisely playing herself, but close enough.) Plenty of former child stars are forever stuck mugging through grown-up roles, or overly insistent on their adult bona fides; the latter might have been a read on Cyrus for a while, but at this point, she seems vastly more comfortable in her skin as a grown-up performer. The occasional touches of juvenilia in her musical work feel organic, even charming, maybe because they’re not part of her hitting those Disney marks anymore. Cyrus still has the training to work as a multi-hyphenate, and flirts with that pop-star-of-all-trades image when producing a “visual album” for a record that would probably be fine with a handful of music videos. But So Undercover and her other movies are the rare starring vehicles that feel like anti-training, anti-proving grounds. They were probably instrumental in Cyrus’s development as an artist who knows how to be herself.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.