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Jon M. Chu’s “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” is billed as a concert documentary, but fewer than half of its 105 minutes are devoted to Mr. Bieber onstage. That was the right choice, because he’s more engaging as a star than he’s ever likely to be as a performer.

You don’t necessarily want to talk about sex when discussing someone whose fans are mostly adolescent girls, but Justin Bieber is nothing if not an old-fashioned, carefully constructed sex symbol, somewhere between a more knowing Donny Osmond and a less insinuating Elvis Presley. When the little girls understand you, music and personality are beside the point.

Mr. Chu is certainly aware of this, given the close-up attention he lavishes on the priceless combination of eyes, hair and jawline, of smile, vocal timbre and self-confidence that have carried the waifish — but fit! — Mr. Bieber to pop-culture Valhalla.

And while “Never Say Never” is an approved biography and marketing tool, in which the 16-year-old Mr. Bieber showcases his winsomeness and humility alongside his modest talents as a singer and dancer, Mr. Chu recognizes that the most compelling visual in this story is all those screaming girls.

So he points the camera 180 degrees away from the star a fair bit of the time, and that view introduces a queasy note of apprehension into the otherwise wholesome picture. Occasionally you see a fan whose senses are particularly deranged by her love for Mr. Bieber, and you hope that his security team has her picture on file.

Mr. Chu, who has experience in both 3-D filmmaking and stage spectacles (he directed the “Step Up” sequels), toes the company line the rest of the time, splicing together home movies from Mr. Bieber’s prefame years and shooting numerous boring segments with his handlers and coaches. It should be noted that the film’s producers include Mr. Bieber and his manager, Scooter Braun, a 29-year-old whose inflections and intensity recall the young Rob Morrow.

The concert scenes are perfunctory, shot in the usual manner with the 3-D cameras gliding back and forth at knee level. A duet between Mr. Bieber and Miley Cyrus, just 16 months older, serves as a cautionary example of how quickly a child star can begin to look middle aged and irrelevant. Several appearances with Usher, on the other hand, demonstrate what it means to own the stage. Next to Usher, his mentor, Mr. Bieber just fades away.

In the film’s best and weirdest shot, Mr. Chu zooms in close as Mr. Bieber flings his head back and forth in slow motion, waving his famously floppy hair in a moment that’s both hilarious and creepy, especially when you’re watching in 3-D.

At 70 or 80 minutes, reduced to crazy fans, backstage atmosphere and home-movie footage of Mr. Bieber playing hockey and pounding the drums, “Never Say Never” could have been entirely satisfying. At 105 minutes it’s exhausting, even though it has been expertly cut together.

Mr. Bieber is amiable company, but on screen, at least, he also projects the opacity of the single-minded and self-assured — the quality that, along with good looks and competent management, makes him such an ideal repository for other people’s dreams. Everyone involved in “Never Say Never” is working overtime to prove that he is, as one of them puts it, “just a regular kid who had a dream,” while everything about the movie screams the opposite. it's written by 564213qq on 2.11