Avicii – I’m Tim 2024 Movie Review
There was another Avicii documentary, True Stories, directed by Levan Tsikurishvili. It appeared in 2017, after the filmmaker had spent the previous few years with the DJ, and upon its release, the doc felt out of step with Tim Bergling’s 2018 passing. In contrast, I’m Tim is never unaware. “This film is based on hundreds of hours of private footage from Tim’s life,” an opening statement reads, “from the very first to the last picture taken.” Work on I’m Tim began only after Bergling died, and continued through the pandemic. And while it includes a lot of stuff shot in the years before, I’m Tim is also guided by a voiceover from Bergling himself, which is matched to existing footage. Given the circumstances of his life and career, some quotes from Avicii stand out: “I was a lot happier before I was famous than after I was famous.”
For the kid from Stockholm with two loving parents, Tim’s trajectory to becoming Avicii began with his teenaged discovery of FL Studio. “It wasn’t like playing guitar or piano,” he says in his voiceover. Bergling had messed around with those instruments, too. Instead, with music software like FL, “you could draw out the notes.” He became an avid poster of his work to house music blogs, and eventually hooked up with Arash “Ash” Pournouri, a manager in the electronic music space with hustle energy to spare. Pournouri was a “dream maker,” a music industry exec says in I’m Tim. “He had the formula,” adds a friend of Bergling.
With Pournouri as his manager and chief marketer, Avicii took off and never looked back. “I kind of went from being young, a kid, you know, from school, to being like straight into touring.” “Levels” happened in 2011, “Wake Me Up” in 2013, and as the shows and tours got bigger and longer – I’m Tim makes this clear – they always included lots of drinks after. As a workload, it was as successful as it was unsustainable. And after a pancreatitis scare and an intervention from family and friends to address his drinking, use of prescription pills, and debilitating anxiety, Bergling made the decision to cut back on being Avicii.
As his voiceover turns reflective – “I wanted to learn how to be content” – I’m Tim highlights how Bergling arrived at this reckoning, and how he created a necessary space between himself and his personal well-being and the public demands of being a DJ and EDM superstar. That his life would end in tragedy does not diminish the value of the music he created, or who he was when he was just a guy. “I’m Tim.”
From concept to completion, I’m Tim was aware of its subject’s demise. And so there is a kind of dissonance baked in, as the adversity that Tim Bergling experienced is chronicled alongside his wildly successful rise as one of EDM’s leading lights. It has also been nearly a decade since Bergling died, so a lot of the facts of this doc have already been shared. This doesn’t mean it is without value. I’m Tim is like an official statement. Not on how Bergling took his own life, but instead on what he did when he was living, and who he touched. At every turn, I’m Tim celebrates how the Avicii sausage got made.
“I’ve always been a melody freak,” Tim Bergling says in the doc. “Always.” And in footage of the professional collaborations he loved to engage with, other musicians marvel at the ability of a kid who showed up to the sessions with only a laptop. (Music legend Nile Rodgers: “He was one of the most natural melody writers I’ve ever met in my life.”) We hear “Levels” in its most skeletal form, playing tinnily out of a computer speaker as Avicii tweaks the final product. We indulge in a sequence that carries from Avicii and Incubus’s Mike Einziger establishing the folk guitar riff of “Wake Me Up” to the absolute second when Aloe Blacc nails the lead vocal. And we revel in the moments that blasted those songs and Avicii himself into the EDM stratosphere. I’m Tim is more than aware of how Bergling passed. But instead of dwelling on that, it tries to activate the space between person and persona.
