The Eras Tour will make anyone a believer

SINCE HUMANKIND HAS BEEN WALKING upright, and maybe even when we still had fins for arms, we've been attracted to shiny, shimmering things. In concert, Taylor Swift is exactly that.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Tickets for the Eras Tour, Swift's first concert tour in five years-set to conclude in November 2024-were costly and difficult to get, which meant you had to either be very lucky or fall within a certain income bracket to participate. But the spirit of the Eras Tour is now available to almost everyone in the form of a concert film, one that is perhaps unsurprisingly exuberant and delightful. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hr. 48 min. of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She's the lure skimming through the water; we're the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.

We are trout, it seems, of many different shapes, sizes, ages, and orientations (even if, statistically, three-quarters of us are white). I saw the film on what was supposed to have been its opening night, although in one of Swift's trademark last-minute moves, she launched the film early. (Swift, who self-produced the film, is distributing it in partnership with AMC.) My enthusiastic audience was about one-third young women, one-third little girls in sparkly attire (accompanied by their parents), and one-third gay men. One of the men handed me an elastic circlet strung with turquoise and smoke gray plastic beads, apologizing for its tiny circumference-one of the small Swifties had given it to him-though it fit me just fine. "Now you can be part of the experience," he told me. Plenty of people could resist, but it turns out that I-really only a moderate Swift fan-am not one of them.