‘Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D’ Review: James Cameron Co-Directs a Titanic Concert Film

In the old days, which weren’t that long ago (in fact, they haven’t really gone away), there was that ritual moment when a rock ‘n’ roll idol, in the midst of delivering a classic anthem, would point the mic away from himself and into the arena, indicating that it was time for the audience to take over and sing the lines. It might be Springsteen doing “Thunder Road,” or Madonna doing “Holiday,” or the moment when I saw an entire Jersey stadium of Billy Joel fans singing “A bottle of white! A bottle of red…” The loving symbiosis of pop star and pop audience doesn’t get much more reverent than that.

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Or does it? In the remarkable new concert film “Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour in Live 3D,” Billie Eilish’s fans sing right along with her, in a state of rapt intensity and devotion…for the entire concert. Great big swaths of the audience are singing every song, every lyric, with maximum commitment and a kind of avid purity, one that extends to impassioned hand gestures and — of course — an ongoing cascade of tears. It’s not just that they’re crying while they’re singing; it’s almost as if the two actions were fused into something called cry-singing.

In those golden olden days, pop idols were thought of in the most hallowed terms possible. In a word, they were gods. But in “Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft,” the feeling at hand — you can see it in the segment of fan interviews featured in the middle of the film — is that Billie Eilish is a goddess who is also a guru, an avatar, a life coach, a creator of safe spaces, and a reason for going on. She’s the one who will heal your pain. I’m not saying that the Beatles or Dylan or ABBA didn’t fill that same space, yet it somehow felt less psychodramatically all-consuming. Today you go to a Billie Eilish concert because you belong to the religion of Billie Eilish. (The same is true of Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or Olivia Rodrigo.) Every moment in the concert is an epiphany. Your ego and maybe your very existence depends on it.

What has changed, in a subtle but profound way, is the image chemistry that now passes between star and audience. In “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” the throngs of people holding up their phones to film the concert aren’t just looking for a memento; they want to possess the experience. And there’s a way that the obsessive singing along, with its aura of “Which song is my absolute, do-or-die, I’m-going-to-cry favorite? Whichever song Billie is singing,” cuts in two directions. It’s all about unhinged worship of the star, the impulse to hold her aloft on the pedestal of your imagination. But the obsessive singing is also about you, the fan, being Billie. By singing along with every lyric, you merge with her and become her. Her incandescence becomes yours. (And you can share that with the world on Instagram.)

All of this is heightened by the electrifying way that James Cameron, the co-director of “Hit Me Hard and Soft” (the film’s other co-director is Eilish herself), has shot the movie. I’ve grown used to seeing perfectly good concert films, in the meticulously stage-managed era of high marketing and promotion, possess a certain look and feel, one that’s often a bit cookie-cutter. (That was true, for instance, of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.”) But “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is a concert film that doesn’t look and feel like other concert films. It’s a true experience, because of a combination of the show itself and the way that Cameron has filmed it.

The movie was shot at two arenas during Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft Tour, one in Manchester, England, and the other in Phoenix, Arizona, and the layout of the concert is stunning. Eilish performs on a stage that’s a long gray rectangle situated in the middle of the arena floor. There are two square holes in the stage — basically orchestra pits where the band resides. Billie romps around the rest of it, as if she were performing solo on an aircraft carrier, and this gives the show an unforced freedom. In one of the impromptu interview segments between Cameron and Eilish that are sprinkled throughout the film, Billie talks about how when she was growing up, the performers she idolized most were rap and hip-hop stars. She was entranced by the no-frills physical freedom that those dudes had onstage, yet she never saw a female pop star perform in that way.

It was Eilish’s ambition to do that, and that’s what she’s always done, though now more than ever. And it lends her performance a spontaneous and inspiring agency. Eilish has always had a homegrown quality, going back to “Ocean Eyes,” her first DIY collaboration with Finneas (released a decade ago). She still does her own hair and makeup, and she’s not really a dancer — she dances like one of us. But in her baseball cap and baggy athletic jersey worn over layers, she struts, and runs, and pogos, and boogies and lets the music guide her through the moment. And Cameron channels all of this with his sculpted kinetic filmmaking. “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is one of those 3D movies where the images don’t pop out at us; instead, they’re heightened in a you-are-there way. The bold thing Cameron does is to get his camera right up close — to Billie and to the audience. With that massive stage, there’s plenty of panorama, but we’re also given an intimacy with Billie that makes everything she does exciting and immersive.

With her soulful yet musky soprano (she hits every high note), Eilish has always been the most original pop star of her generation. And in “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” she solidifies her luscious contradictory identity as a born chanteuse who does bangers. When she’s rocking to the irresistible propulsion of “Bad Guy,” or pouring herself into the melancholy rapture of “TV,” or digging into the jaunty hook of “Bury a Friend” (with its echo of “This Jesus Must Die”), or sinking into the cosmic feminine-mystique reverie of “What Was I Made For?,” listening to her can make you melt.

There are occasional other people on stage, like her backup singers, Jane and Ava, and also Finneas, who for the first time in her career didn’t join her on tour. (The kick-off show, in Quebec, was literally the first show she had ever done without him.) But her brother makes a cameo appearance here, and we feel how deep their love is. That said, there’s a kind of poetry to the way that Billie Eilish commands the stage by herself in “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” And that’s because her true partner is the audience. You might say that’s always been true of pop stars doing arena shows — just think of the screaming hordes of Beatlemania, or the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden in 1972, or Lady Gaga playing to her little monsters. The difference is that the little monsters aren’t just singing along anymore — they’re performing, as surely as the star they worship. They have made the audience itself into the new star.