One Direction: This Is Us - film review

Spurlock filmed One Direction on their Take Me Home Tour for six months, both on stage (in 3D) and behind the scenes. The five boys come across as decent and likeable and there’s nothing at all here that could possibly upset their most fanatical fans. The boys josh about farting (not likely to pose a problem for many teenagers) but they don’t swear at all. They horse around a lot with golf buggies, skateboards and each other but only in the most good-natured, laddish way. At one point, one of them plays a prank involving balancing two tea cups on his head, then letting them fall on the floor and smash — that’s the big break-out, hardly a contender for one of the great rock ’n’ roll outrages, really.

They sing competently, although their dancing is absolute rubbish, as they themselves admit — hopeless, off-the-beat white-boy marching around and arm-waving, mostly. But they not only get on well together, they also all say repeatedly they’d be lonely without each other’s support. Thanks to all the backstage stuff, there are loads of shots of them with their tops off and sometimes they’re just in their boxers, although they pretend to be embarrassed about that. So for 1D fans, this is a five-star film, at least.

In cities all around the world, including in Mexico as recently as June this year, they perform their greatest hits, not always entirely convincingly but never mind, so you get all that too, just like being there. And it’s the concert footage that makes it clear this is a collaborative production not an objective document, as it enhances their modest efforts with CGI things whizzing around in 3D, lots of slow-motion and freeze-frame treatment and graphic novel splashes. Spurlock has taken the money and delivered the movie.

The film states that there’s a lot that should be interesting to anybody about the phenomenon of One Direction — yet none of that is actually addressed here. Simon Cowell appears briefly to explain how he created the band on the X Factor show by putting five failing soloists together — but he’s allowed to tell it his way and isn’t asked a single question.

Nor does Cowell appear to have had any influence over One Direction subsequently, although he has them under contract. Nor is there any talk of money — although one of the boys is seen sweetly buying his overcome family a house. All good, then.

There’s no talk of sex, in any way at all, although sex appeal is what One Direction are all about. No girlfriends appear to upset their fans. Instead, we get their doting mums. The “fans” are constantly praised and thanked by the band for making them such a success but ever so politely it is never once mentioned that in fact they are all teenage girls.

In the crowd shots, just one man appears, a middle-aged gent lifting up his sweater to display an “I [heart] One Direction” T-shirt to the camera — a super-obliging dad, I’d guess.

The girls are all astonishingly excited, tearfully happy, screaming and jumping up and down at these concerts and their frenzy creates a mood of hysteria throughout the film. But any real consideration of what the transaction might be is waved away by a cod neuro-scientist displaying a model of a brain and talking about “a neurotransmitter called dopamine” and asserting that “the girls are not crazy, the girls are just excited”.

In an amazing scene, in Verona, Italy, the band show how they can make the girls scream or quieten down just by raising or lowering their hands to conduct them. It’s a shame that so few of these girls get to speak for themselves: it’s interesting when they do. “They make me feel so happy — when I’m sad, they’re here for me,” says one girl. Another: “I know they love me even though they don’t know me.” The songs are really wickedly well written to give adolescent girls what they need to hear about themselves but are unlikely to get from real boys: “you don’t know you’re beautiful/ if only you saw what I can see”, “you still have to squeeze into your jeans/ but you’re perfect to me”, etc.

The boys don’t write these songs, of course, just as they don’t play the music except for a token bit of guitar (on stage the musicians appear to be hidden behind a screen, so as not to distract). Nor, unlike, say, The Beatles (the film wants to be One Direction’s A Hard Day’s Night) did the boys even come together through their own volition but were artfully blended by Cowell to a perfect recipe of similarity, with just enough difference in the mix to allow choice and identification by the fans.

None of this matters. Although One Direction didn’t actually win the X Factor, they are the ultimate expression of that culture. And they have harmlessly made a lot of teenage girls ecstatically happy. As well as being one big ad and an ongoing part of that process, this film is a vivid document of it all, in the end.