At 70, pop icon and social justice activist Cyndi Lauper isn’t just charging back into the streets. She recently announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary about her life and career, is now streaming on Paramount+.

Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”

And until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across New York City in the 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.

“Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video,” she said of her fans. She has a lot of people who get her: The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than 1 billion times. Forty years later, she holds it up as a thesis, the key to decoding her artistic perspective and understanding everything that followed.

Cyndi Lauper, born in New York’s Brooklyn, raised in Queens, bopped around the house to Beatles songs, her sister, Elen, singing Paul McCartney’s parts and Lauper taking John Lennon’s. It was her earliest lesson in harmony and song structure. But when she left home at 17, it was with a copy of Yoko Ono’s feminist conceptual art book “Grapefruit” in her hands. Ono taught her that “you can create art in your head, and then you can view things differently,” Lauper said. This attitude served her well as she tried (and often failed) to work as a painter, a shoe salesperson, a racetrack hot walker, an IHOP server and the singer in a cover band.

But really, she was just no good at being anyone other than Cyndi Lauper. When she started writing and arranging songs for herself, “I told the stories that I knew about the women that I knew,” she said. “About my mom, my aunt, my grandmother.” They guided her back to the rhythms of her own life, even if, in the beginning, few were interested in listening. “My first concert was to 14 people,” she said, “and I did the encore, OK?”

The documentary’s title is a line ripped from a real-life courtroom drama: Early on, Lauper’s career got entangled in the ambitions of an ex-manager, who sued her to retain control of her music. When the judge sided with Lauper, he banged the gavel and said, “Let the canary sing.”

Once freed, Lauper connected with Robert Hazard, who had written a track called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He’d arranged it as a rock song from a man’s perspective — the girls were the ones he imagined sleeping with — and Lauper had some edits. She recast it as a gleeful public announcement, calling out a sexist double standard (“Oh, mama dear, we’re not the fortunate ones”) while claiming liberation from the workplace, the home and the patriarchy. And she rearranged the notes, pitching her voice so high that it could not be ignored. “I sang that high because I was trumpeting an idea,” she said.

MTV was still in its infancy in 1983, and it was fortuitous that Lauper’s debut album, “She’s So Unusual,” came out just as the network was ascending. She saw her public image as a visual art form. Her makeup artist was a painter, and her stylist was a vintage buyer.

“People sometimes get the wrong idea that it was very thrown together,” Laura Wills, the founder of the vintage shop Screaming Mimi’s, said of the singer’s style. “People just didn’t look like that.”

In the early ’80s, Lauper worked for Wills. When her career took off, Wills started styling her, and the pair often constructed Lauper’s outfits as if sliding chips across a poker table, as in, “I’ll see your polka-dot socks and striped capris, and I’ll raise you a plaid top,” Wills said.

Lauper seemed to shoot to fame as a fully formed feminist icon. She refused to tell interviewers her age, and she insisted that they recognize the politics behind her aesthetic choices. She graced the cover of Ms. magazine and recorded the 1986 song “True Colors,” which resonated with her in the wake of a friend’s death from AIDS.

“I know that I probably lost business because I talked about AIDS a lot,” she said, but figured “I ought to stand up like any good Italian and stick up for my family, you know?” In 2008, she founded True Colors United to help combat homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth. And in 2022, she created the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights fund to support abortion access and other reproductive justice movements.

In 1985, Lauper won the best new artist Grammy after the release of “She’s So Unusual.” The album — and songs like “Time After Time” and “All Through the Night” — broke records.

Lauper made 11 more albums after her debut — among them a blues record, a country record and a dance record. In the early 2000s, she walked over to Broadway, starring in “The Threepenny Opera” and writing the music and lyrics to the musical “Kinky Boots” after Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, tapped her for the gig. Lauper won the Tony Award for best score, the first woman to win alone.

In an industry that requires the rapacious pursuit of the new and the cynical extraction of identity, Lauper was never willing to abandon herself. She had forged the revolutionary style, sang the totemic song. She inspired millions, billions, of fans to be themselves. Why should she have to change who she was?

As the tour approaches, Lauper has been daydreaming about “all the crazy stuff I tried that didn’t work” in her career. The butterfly-winged black dress that she was meant to reveal as she stepped out of a cocoon. The bit where she was supposed to change behind a backlit screen like an old cartoon character. A kind of mechanical skirt that resembled a globe, slowly spinning her around as she sang.

She’s not exactly sure what she’ll pull off this time. Whatever changes, one thing remains the same: “Who the hell I am is who the hell I am.”