I USED TO BE NORMAL: A BOYBAND FANGIRL STORY (Jessica Leski, Australia). 96 minutes. Rating: NN
Early on in this occasionally charming and awkwardly sentimental doc about fangirls, a woman stands against a whiteboard. She’s mapping out the similarities between boy bands who have frenzied the coming-of-age stories among countless girls across decades.
The woman, a lifelong Take That fangirl, lays out the film’s thesis: the connective tissue (looks, themes, appeals) between the Beatles, Backstreet Boys, One Direction and their fans. Boyz II Men get mentioned and just as quickly dismissed as too overtly sexual to fit the bill. Just like that, half the girls I went to elementary school with had their pubescent fantasies brushed aside in a documentary that doesn’t realize a deeper, more prickly conversation was right there giving it sex eyes.
