Bil­lie Eil­ish: The World’s a Lit­tle Blurry

Bil­lie Eil­ish Pirate Baird O’Connell is not like oth­er teenagers, lest you be fooled by her Rick and Morty back­pack or the fact that she’s a card-car­ry­ing Belieber. The World’s a Lit­tle Blur­ry, a new doc­u­men­tary from direc­tor RJ Cut­ler, aims to rec­on­cile that side of Bil­lie with singer-song­writer Bil­lie Eil­ish, the 19-year-old who has every­one from Tyler the Cre­ator to Elton John singing her praises.

Unlike most films of its ilk, Cutler’s doesn’t walk us through Eil­ish being dis­cov­ered and signed so much as quick­ly get that sto­ry out of the way. (Inter­scope Records snapped her up in 2016 on the heels of the Sound­Cloud upload ​‘Ocean Eyes’, which she’d made – like every­thing else in her cat­a­logue – with her old­er broth­er, Finneas.) The film is most con­cerned with what hap­pened in 2019, 50 mil­lion Insta­gram fol­low­ers lat­er: her debut stu­dio album ​‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ which turned her into a record-break­er mul­ti­ple times over.

While the doc­u­men­tary has been in the works since 2018, Eilish’s fam­i­ly seem­ing­ly start­ed sav­ing footage for one long before then (or per­haps it’s just that she’s lived out the entire­ty of her teens in the smart­phone era). Indeed, Apple TV+ is an apt home for the project giv­en how much of it was #ShotOni­Phone. She still lives in the house she and Finneas grew up in, and it’s mes­meris­ing to watch the sib­lings assem­ble her debut album from scratch, if not in their child­hood bed­rooms then dur­ing found moments on the road. Com­bined with the many self-record­ed fam­i­ly busi­ness meet­ings we wit­ness, it some­times feels as if we’re Zoom­ing with the O’Connells, and not in a bad way.

Cutler’s film illus­trates how these whirl­wind years in Eilish’s career have also been some of her most for­ma­tive per­son­al­ly. She pur­sues her driver’s license, which she wants so that she can occa­sion­al­ly be alone, a rar­i­ty for her between her heli­copter par­ents and the whole glob­al star­dom thing. She falls in and out of love with a man she calls ​“Q”, whose exis­tence the doc is retroac­tive­ly mak­ing known. She expe­ri­ences a tur­bu­lent Coachel­la – most­ly gut-wrench­ing, but with one hilar­i­ous inci­dent involv­ing Orlan­do Bloom – until the fes­ti­val is saved by none oth­er than her idol Justin Bieber, who polite­ly holds her head while she sobs into his chest.

Per­haps because Cut­ler had final cut on the film, it feels notably less stage-man­aged than many of its ana­logues even if there are cer­tain nar­ra­tive ellipses. In that spir­it there are numer­ous dif­fi­cult but refresh­ing scenes of Eil­ish dis­cussing her his­to­ry of self-harm, expe­ri­enc­ing Tourette’s‑related tic attacks, and lec­tur­ing her team after she’s com­pelled into a label schmooze­fest dis­guised as a meet-and-greet.

The World’s a Lit­tle Blur­ry clocks in at 140 min­utes, and while they’ll sure­ly fly by for fans, there’s no real rea­son why it couldn’t have been a cool two hours. There’s an over­abun­dance of on-stage sequences, and arguably there didn’t need to be mul­ti­ple roman­tic calls had over speak­er­phone. These blips aside, Cut­ler has put togeth­er an absorb­ing por­trait of one of our most dis­tinc­tive ris­ing stars, one who doesn’t appear to be going any­where any­time soon.