These days I tend to think of a movie as a kind of person. Every film has its own tone, and its own personality. This gets attributed to a director despite being a huge collaborative effort, but that’s because the movies that really work feel like they’re operating in a single direction, where everyone is on the same page, as though they’re acting like one person. It’s also why I find it more useful that, in the same way people are complicated and simply casting them as “good” or “bad” misses potential richness and layers therein, movies go beyond good and bad if we think of them as organic, living things, documents that reveal something to us no matter what we think of their evaluative quality.
The personality of this movie feels very much like the way kids in their late teens and early 20s would want to be depicted: having fun, being carefree, enduring minor dramas and living it up with their friends. Kind of like a more age-appropriate Entourage. There’s a sort of innocent rebelliousness to it, a kind of pacified punk rock that they undoubtedly think makes them look badass but makes everyone else think “aw, aren’t you cute.” Most of all, it’s just an enjoyable and entertaining ninety minutes from moment to moment, which is basically the way the band seems to be experiencing their stardom.
What makes One Direction: This Is Us…I wouldn’t quite say “beautiful,” but certainly interesting, engaging and worth a watch is this surprising sense of self-awareness and skill in portraying what the group is about in as simple and cinematically pleasing a way possible. It’s a low bar to clear, but of the recent trend of popstar concert documentary film spanning back three or four years, this just might be the best one ever.
