Bandslam

It's High Fidelity: Origins in this High School Musical-style comedy about a music-obsessed teenager guiding his group through the local battle of the bands competition. Starring Vanessa Hudgens, Gaelan Connell, Alyson Michalka and Lisa Kudrow
For those who felt that what High School Musical 3 really needed were more references to Sonic Youth and Samuel Beckett - and who among us didn't? - then teen musical Bandslam may just strike a chord. Proviso # 1: Todd Graff's film is a blatant attempt to seduce moody year nines in Killers T-shirts who can't get in to the latest Judd Apatow. Proviso # 2: No male over nine will ever admit they like it. Proviso # 3: Bandslam is roughly 100 per cent less cool than it thinks it is. Yet this formulaic teen comedy with its hastily grabbed indie rock cred and upsettingly pointless David Bowie cameo is also endearingly sweet, broadly non-patronising, and it gives its characters more space and depth than all three High School Musicals put together and plenty of winsome indie rom-coms too. Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) is the sensitive rock 'n' roll obsessive who composes imaginary letters to Bowie and knows about the Velvet Underground post-John Cale but can't fit in at school. With his kinda-cool mom Karen (Phoebe from 'Friends' cameoing as Lisa Kudrow) he moves to New Jersey where he hooks up with high school senior Charlotte (Alyson Michalka) who, like Will, turns out to have an unexpected past and a few secrets in the present. As the school's annual battle of the bands competition - Bandslam - looms, Will becomes manager and musical mentor to Charlotte's slightly crummy group, eventually turning them into, well, a slightly less crummy but actually still quite crummy group whom he names I Can't Go On I'll Go On, a phrase lifted unacknowledged from Samuel Beckett's 'The Unnamable'. A joke there, of sorts, for English students. Meanwhile Will's suffering his way through a tentative romance with mildly misanthropic Sa5m (that's "Sam with a silent five" played by HSM's Vanessa Hudgens) who, because Bandslam respects the demands of the teen romance, will force Will to work out who he is before letting him inside her head. Gaelan Connell's self-conscious yet self-aware indie kid is a junior John Cusack circa High Fidelity mashed up with a diddy Zach Braff in Garden State and then dropped into a teatime version of Almost Famous. Will even quotes that Almost Famous "golden god" line. (Also shoehorned shamelessly into the script are references to Eels, Pink Floyd, Violent Femmes, Cheap Trick, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and performances from modish indie operators Burning Hotels.) Will's background comes loaded with dysfunction but the film writes this safely into the margins, only acknowledging the bad stuff in order to prime the feelgood climax. What enables it to work isn't the uninspired plot or the band, but Will's reticent romance with Sa5m which evolves in heady fits and starts - including a pilgrimage to legendary New York punk venue CBGBs - until the accidental betrayal, the tender reconciliation and finally the major lift. Perhaps because Simon Cowell now owns the rights to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', the couple's highly unlikely tune is 'You Gotta Walk (Don't Look Back)' - Mick Jagger's 1978 collaboration with former Wailer Peter Tosh. It's a choice which suggests, not unhappily, that Bandslam's soundtrack is actually a 45-year-old 'Mojo' reader's iPod operating on shuffle. For all his rock 'n' roll literacy, Will's band peddle a grim line in stadium ska and the finale is a frankly incredible act of wish fulfilment - as in really, highly ridiculous - which delivers the film to fantasy. But by this point no one's taking that aspect seriously. Bandslam is immeasurably tamer than Kiss comedy Detroit Rock City or even Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist, which co-opted indie chic in a far more shameless manner than this. But Todd Graff's film is immeasurably more charming than recent rock-com's such as The Rocker and it's sweetly sensitive in its comic portrayal of bedroom angst. If you're a 15-year-old indie kid discovering The Warlocks on last.fm then you may feel that this is production company Walden Media, noted for their promotion of family values, robbing you of your charity shop culture and selling it back to you for twice the price. You could be right. If you're over thirty-three-and-a-third and remember wishing the late John Hughes would take Ally Sheedy and Anthony Michael Hall's characters from The Breakfast Club and make a sequel about them with Fugazi instead of Simple Minds on the soundtrack then - well, you should have gone to film school and made it yourself. Yet there's something endearing about Bandslam's elevation of the indie geek to hero, its genuinely sparky performances, its sensitive approach to teen relationships and its acknowledgement that there are two principle items of furniture in every teenage boy's bedroom, and the important one is called a stereo.
Verdict Implausible, formulaic, too ponderous for young kids, not cool enough for teenagers and yet strangely hard to resist. File away under extremely guilty pleasure.