In Cameron Crowe’s genre-defining Almost Famous, Lester Bangs famously proclaims that a young fictionalized version of Crowe arrived “just in time for the death rattle, last gasp, last grope” of rock ‘n’ roll during the mid-1970s.
So now we find ourselves in 2009 and presented with the atrociously safe and bastardized Bandslam, a film which can best be described as an attempt to dig up the withered corpse of rock ‘n’ roll, sanitize it with Purell and then violate it egregiously with ska.
Glimmers of hope arrive with the film’s beginning when its dweeby, nasaly protagonist Will Burton (Gaelan Connell, A Dirty Shame) prefaces a voice-over with the greeting “Dear David Bowie.” At first, one is grateful. Considering the PG pedigree of the movie, it is a small miracle that he did not address his fan mail to Pete Wentz, Hannah Montana or Chad Kroeger.
Wishes for something more and different are dashed, however, when Burton begins a tired critique of a high school he labels “Guantánamo with lunch.” As if casually equating his social solitude with the plight of the indefinitely detained wasn’t enough, he goes on to smugly mock the “trustafarians” (rich kids who love reggae) and label himself part of the “indie rock” clique.
At this point – even before the Disney-manufactured starlets are trotted out – the film loses any shred of credibility. Anyone who knows anything about so-called “indie rock” should scoff, chortle and join the bullies in torturing Burton.
First, it is asinine to embrace indie as a clique since the whole point is to escape the stifling cliquishness of mainstream genres. Even the term “indie rock,” conjured by aging baby boomer rock critics out of thin air to explain the wide variety of new music the kids in tight pants and flannel love would be anathema to anybody in the know.
Fortunately for Burton, his creepily protective mother, Karen (Lisa Kudrow, Paper Man), moves them to exciting, vibrant New Jersey to attend Martin Van Buren High School. It is here Burton encounters an array of teen tarts anybody with his poor-man’s-Shia-LeBeouf looks has no business talking to.
One of them is wild, nebulous former-cheerleader-turned-garage-band-lead-singer Charlotte Banks (Aly Michalka, Super Sweet 16: The Movie), who corrals him into managing her band in a local musical competition that is aptly described as “Texas high school football big.”
The other tween idol flanking him on the poster is a bookish, brooding and largely hooded Vanessa Hudgens playing love interest Sa5m. No, there are no typos in that sentence – Hudgens is spending a film with her big, plastic face buried in Sense and Sensibility as a lonely rebel who instructs all she meets “the five is silent” in her name.
Equally bizarre but much more infuriating is the process by which Burton assembles Banks’ band and they go about putting on a show. The filmmakers’ use of The Velvet Underground is truly maddening. It is the one band that has thus far escaped, to a degree, the easy tween castration which befell The Strokes, The Ramones and The Beatles.
One has to wonder if director and co-writer Todd Graff – in the process of anointing Burton a “musical genius” – just does not care if he completely plagiarizes the far superior Adventureland and forces a load of airbrushed teenagers to profess love for a band whose name itself is a shout-out to the underground sado-masochistic scene.
For that matter, where are the drugs? Burton goes to a rock show and encounters all sorts of musicians from drummers to guitarists, and we’re meant to believe none of them ever drank or injected a substance not sanctioned by teen stars’ handlers? Does Graff know why they called Bowie “The Thin White Duke” or that Lou Reed wrote a 7-minute opus called “Heroin”?
The variety of mangled references and the subsequent scrubbing of any offending material from their lives (which would suggest creativity came in part from chemical substances and alternative sexual mores) has a simple explanation. Perhaps, Graff took a Rock 101 course only to cover his ears and eyes during the sex and drugs chapters.
A misguided director; empty, robotic stars; and complete deafness to tone only partially explain why Bandslam commits such awful rock ‘n’ roll necrophilia. Bowie, himself, should be heavily scrutinized for licensing his songs (“Changes” even becomes a ringtone) after denying musical biopic genius Todd Haynes for Velvet Goldmine.
Bandslam will not be big enough or consequential enough to herald a forthcoming end to independent music. But beneath the awful voice-overs and willfully naive ideology, it seems one can just barely hear the baby-faced tweens beginning to shake the death rattle.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 0.5 out of 5 Stars
