Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shawn Mendes: In Wonder’ on Netflix, An Engaging Document of Gen Z Star Power

Shawn Mendes: In Wonder (Netflix) follows the young pop singer as he tours the world in 2019, considers the aspirational path that got him here, and confronts his issues with anxiety as he creates his fourth album. While In Wonder has wrinkles of boilerplate promotional material, it benefits from having a thoughtful, unassuming guy as its core subject.

SHAWN MENDES: IN WONDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In Wonder gives Shawn Mendes the star chronicle treatment, stringing together footage from his 2019 world tour, the hubbub of life on the road, quieter moments with the singer and songwriter in conversation or back at home in Ontario, Canada, and scenes of the recording sessions for his new album Wonder. We get a sense of who Mendes is almost immediately. As the camera tracks him through the shadows of the backstage area, we’re rushed into the wide-open space of an arena, dark but for thousands and thousands of twinkling mobile devices. Mendes hugs a fan beyond the lead barrier, touches a few outstretched hands, and leaps to the stage in the center of the room, where his piano awaits. The lights come up, and the crowd goes ape. “The ego comes rushing in, and it goes ‘Don’t mess up,’ Mendes tells us in voiceover. “Because you’re the man. Everyone is saying you’re the man. So don’t mess up. And you get to the mic and your first note is flat. Always.” For a Grammy-nominated 22-year-old with three sold-out world tours and as many hit albums to his name, Shawn Mendes is disarmingly humble throughout In Wonder.

As recently as 2015, Shawn Mendes was just a high school kid with a dream, idolizing Justin Timberlake and Ed Sheeran and pushing Vines of his cover songs out into the ether. So it’s refreshing that he seems to realize this, tempering his stardom with respect for those on his team as well as the paying customers. We see Mendes, his band, and his tour manager encouraging each other backstage, days into a 100-date tour. And we see him smiling genuinely and offering kind words to teenagers at a meet-and-greet, all of whom can barely hold it together in the gushing manner of pop music fans since time immemorial.

As the Mendes live show moves from North America to Europe and onward to the Southern Hemisphere, the vigor of youth runs headlong into the grind of touring, and the physical limitations of the human throat. Mendes gives some thought to his struggles with anxiety, and the demands for perfection when you live and work in the public eye. He also encounters laryngitis and fatigue, and the logistic headaches of being forced to postpone a stadium date and turn away 50,000 fans. (There are a lot of tears in that crowd.) But his mom, his girlfriend Camilla Cabello, and watching Kobe Bryant videos on YouTube build him back up, and In Wonder ends on a grace note with Mendes in the studio in Carmel, California, meditating over expanses of ocean as he records his next record and prepares to tour once again.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Mendes cut his world tour teeth as the opening act on Taylor Swift’s globe-spanning trot in support of 1989; like In Wonder, Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour (Netflix) mixes live show theatrics with insight from its star. Netflix also features the Jonathan Demme-directed Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids, which goes all in on the live performance angle. And if you can find it, it’s worth catching Mendes contemporary Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic Live at the Apollo, which was first broadcast on CBS in 2017, but doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere right now.

Performance Worth Watching: Shawn Mendes is the heart, soul and center of In Wonder, but with his graceful mix of star power, Canadian Nice bona fides, and genuine thoughtfulness about his own craft and career, he also makes it eminently watchable.

Memorable Dialogue: Throughout In Wonder, Mendes weaves encouraging affirmations out of the clear blue sky. “You have to not only accept imperfection. But embrace imperfection, because that imperfection in that moment is what turns into magic in the next.”

Sex and Skin: Mendes and Cabello are captured canoodling here and there. They’re so painfully cute together, it hurts.

Our Take: With its nonlinear format and fly-on-the-wall obsession with its central figure, In Wonder is not a traditional concert film. What live footage it does feature is presented as punctuation for moments in the narrative, rather than as straight ahead performances of Mendes’ material. We see the gathered thousands from the star’s perspective; we are asked to focus on him banging away at his acoustic guitar with reckless abandon, but only catch fleeting glimpses of his backing band, and see hardly any interaction. This will leave some viewers in the lurch. For as popular as Mendes and his music have become, he’s a product of the digital era, and its inherent detachment. In Wonder magnifies its subject’s skill set — his lithe singing voice, and eager turns at the guitar and piano — but doesn’t depict Mendes as a performer in the conventional sense, of someone standing on a stage, fronting a band and bashing away at a bunch of songs.

At the same time, card-carrying members of the Mendes Army will eat up In Wonder‘s more personal moments with a knife and fork. There’s a nice intimacy to the stretches of time spent on tour buses and in SUVs, with Shawn waxing philosophical about fame, family and friendship, and he often breaks into song. There’s a cool connective moment showcasing the creative process, when in one sequence Mendes describes an impromptu green room recording session for a song idea he’s working on — he’s singing, mouth-drumming and imitating horn sections all at once — and it’s paid off later, when the same track is being cut during the recording sessions for Wonder. Fans should also swoon over the “Shawn at Home” sections, with his parents and little sister joshing him around the family kitchen island for being a globetrotting pop star, or when Mendes presents his childhood bedroom as a sort of shrine to Where It All Began, the very place in which he recorded the Vines that launched his career. In a previous age, this would have been revealed in a spread in Sassy, Tiger Beat or Bop.

With his stunningly rapid rise, ease on stage, classic good looks, sinewy falsetto and cerebral take on writing songs about love and wonder, there’s also some cosmic connectivity here between Shawn Mendes and Jeff Buckley. Mendes will have a lot more to say in his young career, but he represents well the flame at the heart of that late, lamented performer.

Our Call: STREAM IT. After lengthy world tours and three chart-topping albums, In Wonder is the celebratory document Shawn Mendes’ charmed career deserves. For his legions of screaming, crying fans, certainly, but also for anyone looking for an audit of Young Stardom in the Gen Z era.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Shawn Mendes: In Wonder on Netflix