Towards the end of Nothing But The Beat: The Movie, David Guetta is sitting backstage at Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, beaming. We’ve just seen him helicoptered to the vast Speedway to play for a crowd of 80,000. Into the trailer walks Afrojack, who delivers an anecdote for the cameras about a time his friend David crashed at his house in Holland. “We went to sleep at 5 in the morning and I woke up at 11,” he recalls. “And I saw David sitting like this…” He mimics a grinning, wide-awake Guetta typing on his laptop. “He even had a coffee, and I didn’t know I had a coffee machine.”

There’s no shortage of stories like this one about David Guetta. “He is on the entire time,” his US booking agent Paul Morris told Billboard last year. “He seems to have the ability to go non-stop, 24/7, 365 days a year.” In October 2011, that round-the-clock schedule brought Guetta to Sydney for a few intensive days of interviews and the Australian premiere of Nothing But The Beat: The Movie. On a Monday night, a mixed bunch of journalists, industry types and competition winners were greeted at The Beresford Hotel by a pair of topless promo girls body-painted red. Soon we were all settled, glow bracelets on wrists, to watch a feature-length advertisement for the David Guetta brand. The movie is a co-production between Partizan Films and Burn Studios, an offshoot from The Coca-Cola Company’s Burn energy drink. In 2011, Burn Studios and David Guetta announced a partnership that aligns Burn with Guetta’s Fuck Me I’m Famous events. We’re not talking about impartial doco-making here – but at least it’s a glossy one-sided view.

The movie begins with surging scenes of festival crowds and Guetta’s ecstatic mug, intercut with reverent soundbites from the likes of Ludacris and Kelly Rowland (“It’s about feeling like you’re flying”). We then follow him to a hotel room in Glasgow where he’s tinkering away on a laptop, finessing a new tune (what will later turn out to be Glasgow on the ‘electronic’ disc of Nothing But The Beat). The tinny sound coming out his laptop speakers is soon booming across an arena of mad Scots with their war cry of “here we, here we, here we fucking go!” The film is structured around these kinds of sequences: the mundane routine of airports, hotels and dressing rooms, followed by the fleeting, heightened atmosphere of the shows.

We saw this kind of thing in the Swedish House Mafia ‘documentary’ Take One, but where the Swedes couldn’t stifle their diva moments, Guetta genuinely seems like an over-excited kid throughout. His teeth-whitened grin is never far from the screen. “That was fun!” he beams after bounding off-stage in Glasgow. “And I loved that new beat; it’s cool, huh?”