Justin BieberLooking good,sounding better

Bieber,who will turn 17 next month,is emerging as a teenage star who doesn’t condescend to his audience. There’s little mystery in this film because there’s little mystery in Bieber. As childhood videos in Never Say Never make clear,Bieber had plenty of personality before the machine got a hold of him.

Still,the concert footage,from his Madison Square Garden show last August,is rote and unimaginative; Bieber still doesn’t know how to fill the huge rooms that he’s been allowed to take over. The movie is propaganda designed for children as well as their parents; no kid is interested in what Randy Phillips,the chief executive of the touring giant AEG Live,has to say about Bieber’s success,but there he is pontificating,reassuring parents that their children are supporting a potent phenomenon.

There’s footage of Bieber visiting his hometown,Stratford,Ontario,and having fun with old friends. He signs a stack of programmes and flicks them away petulantly,as a kid might. And there’s the awkwardness of his duet with Miley Cyrus: Bieber has not yet learned how to lie with his body.

And there’s plenty that’s not in this film. Bieber doesn’t sit for a proper interview to contextualise his success in his own words; the closest he comes to explaining himself is in a silent slow-motion shot of him shaking his trademark tousle,the softest of soft porn. Who needs vocal cords when you’ve got hair this good?

Except there’s this: Very much in spite of itself Never Say Never ends up being the best argument to date for Bieber as a singer. There’s clear audio of him at the Madison Square Garden concert,which sounds strong. There are happenstance clips of him singing,sometimes well,as he passes the time. And there are the old videos of him singing covers at around the age of 12.

There’s no reason to think Bieber couldn’t be a kind of saviour,if only because he’s improved virtually every world he’s infiltrated lately. Super Bowl watchers saw him mock himself in a Best Buy ad with Ozzy Osbourne. And the best part of the Bieber movie: you don’t even have to go to the movie theatre to see it. His old pre-fame clips are still readily available on YouTube,including some that oddly didn’t make the film. On Sunday night at the Grammys a widely trafficked video of a young Bieber singing for Usher,his future mentor,got prime play before the two performed live.

You can be part of the movie too if you want. Or need. In an upset Bieber lost the best new artist award at the Grammys to the jazz musician Esperanza Spalding. Some of Bieber’s fans,a hungry and vicious lot,responded the only way they knew how: by defacing Spalding’s Wikipedia entry. When it comes to Bieber,they are used to having their way. JON CARAMANICA