From left: Kevin Jonas, Nick Jonas, and Joe Jonas perform in Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
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For the movie debut of its first boy-band sensation, Disney has followed the Beatles template. JB 3D is basically A Hard Day's Night, but with the proportion of onstage to backstage material reversed: more of the former, less of the latter. It's constructed as a day in the life, following the lads from early morning through some guest appearances, an interlude in a park and then the big show. Like the Beatles movie, this one has the motifs of captive celebrity — the brothers lithely escape from fans chasing them down city streets — and of the stars taking their fame with sensible aplomb, as if clarity comes only in the eye of the media hurricane. At one point watching clips of the Beatles and other teen idols on Sullivan, the Jonases are presented as people schooled in the history of pop-mania, its skyrocketing and fizzling. Their mission is to enjoy and survive it.
So do their fans, some of whom "waited 72 hours in the rain" for tickets to the Madison Square Garden concert that is the movie's centerpiece. They reach across police barriers for a healing touch from the god-boys. (The 3D effects, which include the flinging of sunglasses, guitar picks and other sacred relics into the crowd, are meant to bring the Brothers this close to their young viewers.) Throughout, the tone is hopeful, exuberant; if the crowd included desperate stalker girls, you can bet they were edited out. In a way, the fans are as knowledgeable about their role as the Brothers are about theirs. One shows up with Jonas-style sideburns charcoaled on her face. Three guys presenting themselves as faux-Jonases get a modicum of attention from the girls. That too is a hallowed tradition: dressing like a famous person in order to get attention and maybe some action.
That's a dividing line between old and modern pop-music culture. The Beatles were just about the last gigantic group that was pre-sexual. The guys stood still, played and sang; their girl-fans screamed in veneration, not in venery. The Rolling Stones changed that. From then on and forever, the public playing of rock 'n' roll was a physical activity, and the focus was on the lead singer's sex appeal. By now that tradition is so dominant that it may not even be sexual; it's simply the language of pop performance.
It has also exalted the theatrical element over the musical. It happens that the Jonases write most of their own songs, which on first listen did not make me eager for a second. But the basic impact is visual: they're meant to be simultaneously cheerful and lubricious, to fulfill their fans' childlike idolatry and blooming sexual awareness. That's how the brothers' antiseptic image, and the movie's G rating, can coexist with the Jaggeresque poses and wind sprints of the one in the center, Joe Jonas.
Would they have reached these heights if Joe weren't so dreamy-cute, so very nearly David Cassidy? His brothers are presentable — soccer-boy Kevin using the stage's long runway as a launch pad for acrobatics, choir-boy Nick strumming or drumming in relatively oblivious repose — but Joe is the teen meat. All eyes, hearts and prepubescent yearnings focus on him, and he gives it back, pleased to be watched, in true exhibitionist showmanship. A few songs into the set, he removes his jacket to reveal a sleeveless chartreuse T shirt and a golden physique, not over-muscled but taut and downy. (Look, I'm paid to observe these things.) When the guys go backstage to change shorts, Joe goes briefly topless, exposing a rivulet of hair from his navel to his briefs. He flashes a mock-stern look at the camera, but the shot is in the movie. That can't be an accident.
Nor is the concert's big special effect, when the brothers pick up large hoses, hold them at their waists and — I'm not making this up, ask anybody — squirt jismatic spumes of white gooey stuff into the audience. The Jonases may have vowed to remain virgins till marriage, but they can have simulated sex with the girleens in the Garden. And the fans can end the evening feeling both clean and sticky.
This has got to be part of a Disney expansion strategy. Where once the company aimed to keep its target market in perpetual childhood, now it is priming kids for the more overtly erotic signals of puberty. The Jonas Brothers concert is like a very gentle sex-education lecture given by the most adorable young teacher around, and his two brothers.
—Richard Corliss