Backstage after one of her Manchester shows, Billie Eilish holds her hands up to the camera. “Do you see the scrapes?” she asks.

The scratches, mild but visible, are from the ravenous audience who pushes toward her night after night — grasping for a hug, a high-five, a brush of her fingers or the hem of her sleeve. And while Eilish professes not to mind (“I come from being that fan, so to me, I understand that need and that desperation”), even her generosity must have its limits. The realities of time and space mean there will always be more people longing to get up close and personal with Eilish than there is of her to go around.

Good thing, then, that James Cameron has never been one to limit himself to the realities of time and space.

Co-directed by the Avatar maestro with the singer-songwriter herself, the clunkily titled concert documentary Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) cannot possibly replace the thrill of being there among the shrieking throngs, let alone meeting one’s hero face to face. But with its vivid footage, sometimes captured from breathlessly intimate proximity, you might be able to believe, just for a moment, that you could really reach right through the screen and touch her.

Captured over four back-to-back performances in Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena in July 2025, the nearly two-hour movie intersperses most of her set list with endearing snippets of behind-the-scenes footage from the day leading up to the show.

The offstage material is pleasant but mostly perfunctory. Sure, it’s fun to know that Eilish tries to set up a puppy room for her crew at every stop, partnering with a local animal shelter to bring in rescues for them to pet or even adopt (“I’m doing this on my next movie for sure,” Cameron remarks), but it’s hardly revelatory. And while her comments about her tomboyish style — so unapologetically unlike the ultra-femme, skin-bearing outfits generally associated with pop princesses — are inspiring, they’re also not anything we haven’t heard before.

It’s when Eilish is onstage that the film pops. Even from my extremely suboptimal vantage point in the very front corner of the theater, I was awed by the depth and crispness of the 3D imagery. The close-ups are shot in such detail that you can see the fuzz on her arms or the flex of her fingers as she climbs a ladder. From farther away, the camera captures dizzying scope: the ear-piercing enthusiasm of the crowd, the bright lights and blaring sound that “envelop you like the best sensory overload,” as Eilish puts it.

That combination of intimacy and scale seems particularly appropriate for Eilish, a celebrity whose girl-next-door casualness belies her megawatt star power, and a musician whose vocals run the gamut from a barely-there murmur to a full-throated belt.

Her staging, too, captures that dichotomy. Where other A-list acts take a more-is-more approach with lavish setups and dazzling costumes, Eilish keeps her act deceptively modest. She stands on a sparse black platform decorated by not much more than colorful beams of light. Her dancers are nonexistent — aside from Eilish, her backing band and a late surprise appearance by her brother and producer, Finneas, the only bodies up there are two backup singers in aggressively normie polo shirts. There are no costume changes, just a jersey-and-shorts combo that wouldn’t look out of place at a backyard barbecue and loose curls that Eilish styles each night herself.

The choreography is so unassuming it feels almost not like choreography at all. For bouncier numbers, like the playfully horny “Lunch,” she runs and jumps around the stage with such force that, she confesses, her shins have been aching for months. For gentler ones, like the melancholic “When the Party’s Over,” she simply lies down, like she’s back in the bedroom where she and Finneas have recorded all her hit albums.

The only giveaway that all this is actually well-rehearsed schtick is Eilish’s precise control over her own physicality, which can shift from achingly tender to slyly sexy at the drop of a beat. The end result is a command of the crowd’s energy so effortlessly total that Cameron is moved to marvel at it. “You’re like a tuning fork,” he tells her, “and they’re hitting the same beats exactly.”

All things must end, however, even for pop stars so beloved their fans regard them as akin to gods. At the finish of the night, once the final notes have faded and the last bits of confetti have dropped, Eilish, now coming off less like a savior blessing her masses than just another young woman at the end of a tough but rewarding workday, hops into a waiting SUV. As she pulls out from the garage onto the open road, she waves goodbye to her fans one last time.

But not to us, not quite yet. Cameron’s camera stays with her in the backseat as she rolls down the window and sticks out her head, her expression one of sincere bliss. “I never used to leave the hotel except to go to the venue,” she confesses. “These drives would be the only time I would smell fresh air.”

I waited, then, for her to explain whether things are different now — whether she gets out more these days, how she avoids cameras or starstruck passersby when she does, how she winds down in her hotel room when she doesn’t. But the answers never came. Having gifted us this wonderful illusion of closeness, Hit Me Hard and Soft — The Tour (Live in 3D) now offers her the grace of distance. We leave her there in the car, hurtling through the dark night back to whatever planet idols are made.