On our way to see the concert documentary Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, my not-yet-13-year-old-daughter asked, “Dad, do you think they’d mind if during the movie I screamed?” I said I thought the studio would be thrilled if she screamed. She’d prove she was a Biebermaniac, a Belieber.
The film, as it happens, is packed with little girls screaming — and moaning and weeping and looking as if they’re ten seconds away from setting themselves on fire. I’d have screamed if I was in marketing, because this is one awesome piece of packaging.
The key, of course, is that Justin Bieber is presented as a grassroots phenomenon, someone who rose without corporate packaging. Never Say Never opens with a computer screen and a mouse clicking on well-known YouTube viral videos: laughing babies, cute dogs and so on. Then there’s a YouTube video of little Justin in a paneled room, a small-town kid with a big-city voice. “Hey, check out this kid!” reads a fake but representative e-mail. Bieber is, we’re told, the first social-network superstar.
The movie is cunningly woven to show the tension between his insane success and his determination to remain a sane, normal 16-year-old. His background helps. His teenage mom and dad split when he was ten months old — but we’re told he always had the love of his mother and her parents, not to mention God and Jesus. He wasn’t hatched in a studio incubator. His talent manager, Scott “Scooter” Braun, first saw him on YouTube. He couldn’t interest record companies, though, because Bieber didn’t have the requisite connection to Disney or Nickelodeon. So Braun enlisted Usher, whom Bieber idolized. But in the end, says Braun, Bieber sold himself.
Director Jon M. Chu jumps back and forth between Bieber’s rise and the countdown to his sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden — the “pinnacle,” the movie says, as it counts down “Ten Days to Madison Square Garden,” “Nine Days to Madison Square Garden.”
