Toronto Star

Eilish documentar­y a raw and musical journey

- LINDSEY BAHR

Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry

★★½ (out of 4)

An Apple TV Plus and Neon release. Directed by R.J. Cutler. Starring Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell, Maggie Baird, Patrick O’Connell, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber. 140 minutes. Not rated.

If you’re coming to “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” hoping for a primer on the music sensation, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s twohour and 20-minute documentar­y about the singer and songwriter is not biography or reportage. It’s a verité-style plunge into her life, her home, her concerts, her process, her Tourette’s, her brother’s bedroom where they famously write all their songs and even her diary in the year in which she became a star.

It is raw and filled with music — more than 20 of her songs are played over the course of the film, including live performanc­es, like her extraordin­ary Coachella showing in 2019. Some are shown in full. It is also very, very long.

Cutler, who also did “The September Issue” and “Belushi,” cited seminal verité rock docs “Gimme Shelter” and “Don’t Look Back” as inspiratio­n. But both of those came a few years and albums into the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan’s superstard­om. Eilish’s ascent is extraordin­ary and yet she is still in the early part of her artistic and actual life.

Fans will certainly disagree, as is their right, but it is an enormous amount of unfiltered space to give to an artist who is still getting started. There’s no right or wrong way to make a documentar­y like this, but for the Eilish curious and not the Eilish diehards, it’s initiation by fire without any context.

Clearly someone in Eilish’s camp had an eye toward legacy when they invited Cutler to her family home to see if he wanted to follow the then-16-year-old during her breakout year, during which she and her brother Finneas wrote, recorded and released her debut album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”

Eilish is funny and sullen and charismati­c and moody, just as you’d want and expect a teenage artist to be. She gets dreamy and protective of her followers, saying “they’re not my fans, they’re like part of me” and complains that, for her, writing songs is “torture.” And she breaks the fourth wall occasional­ly (she’d told Cutler that she wanted it to be like “The Office”) to let the audience know that she knows they’re there.

Her brother is the driving force of a lot of the productivi­ty in their cosy family home in the Highland Park neighbourh­ood of Los Angeles (he’s since moved out). Their parents home-schooled them and music was always part of their life, with mom Maggie Baird teaching them how to write songs and dad Patrick O’Connell teaching instrument­s.

It is interestin­g to see her and Finneas riff about lyrics and test things out — he has anxiety about having to produce a hit and she couldn’t care less — and the juxtaposit­ion of her glamorous appearance­s and performanc­es with the modest normalcy of their home life.

There are some terrific moments that Cutler caught out on the road: In one instance, she meets Katy Perry, who introduces Eilish to her fiancé, “a big fan.” It’s only later that Eilish realizes that was Orlando Bloom. Her brother reminds her he is “Will Turner from the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies.” She wants a redo. “I thought he was just some dude,” she says.

Another is her first meeting with Justin Bieber. She talks about her long-standing obsession in an interview; he gets in touch three days before her album release about wanting to collaborat­e. (She tells her manager that “he could ask me to kill my dog and I would.”)

Then at Coachella he appears as she’s greeting a hoard of her fans. She freezes and becomes a fan herself. Later she’ll sob over a heartfelt message he sends her.

And there are some incredibly vulnerable moments, too, showing the performer exhausted and annoyed. Eilish remains as unique and enigmatic as she seems from a distance, but also is presented very much like a normal Los Angeles teenager, getting her driver’s licence, dreaming of a matte black Dodge Challenger and texting with a largely absent boyfriend.

Fans will eat up every morsel of this documentar­y and wish for more. For newcomers, however, it might benefit from watching in instalment­s, which is one of the benefits of the film debuting on Apple TV Plus. There’s even an intermissi­on to help take the guesswork out of where to hit pause.

This does not come across as a vanity project that’s been intensely controlled by the star or the machinery around her, either. It’s refreshing. It’s also probably one of the last times we’ll all be invited into her life in this way.

 ?? APPLE TV PLUS VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Billie Eilish performs with her brother Finneas O’Connell in a scene from “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry.”
APPLE TV PLUS VIA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Billie Eilish performs with her brother Finneas O’Connell in a scene from “Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry.”

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