Movie Review: ROCK OF AGES

"It's all the same, only the names will change."

In 1987, the wailing guitar solos were as big as the hair you couldn't get your headphones around to listen on your Walkman. Sherrie (Julianne Hough) wants to make it big so takes a one-way trip to Hollywood. She's from Oklahoma (aren't they all?) and when she arrives in the big city, there are protesters outside The Bourbon Room, a happening rock club, crying against the depravity this type of music brings to their community. Lugging a suitcase full of her favorite records (to refresh your memory, they're big and made of vinyl), a thug mugs her. Drew (Diego Boneta), a barback at The Bourbon with his own dreams of making it big (don't they all?), sees this and gets her a job as a waitress. Oh, and while most of this is going on, they're singing.

They're singing because it's a musical of course, Rock of Ages, a musical adaptation of the Broadway hit featuring the hair metal anthems of that era. On the bus, Sherrie and the rest of the passengers are doing Night Ranger's "Sister Christian"; at the bar, Drew is singing Poison's "Nothin' But a Good Time." They soon fall for each other and sing every power ballad you've ever heard while walking around in a hazy shade of pheromones. And when mega rock star Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) decides to use The Bourbon for his band's final show before going solo, Sherrie convinces Dennis (Alec Baldwin) and Lonny (Russell Brand), who run the club, to let Drew's band to open for them. Things go awry in all kinds of ways, all in the midst of everyone singing the best cuts from your local 80s radio station.

Popular art that capitalizes on nostalgia is certainly not a new thing. Nor are movies that are based on existing properties. Rock of Ages of course is both and I often wondered to myself how redundant something like this is. I never have an inherent problem with a movie adapted from another medium (be it a play, book, whatever). But it seems recently like there has been a fair share of these jukebox musicals, ones in which the narrative exists mainly as a clothesline on which to hang a bunch of songs with which we've grown more than familiar. Jersey Boys uses the songs of The Four Seasons; Movin' Out features Billy Joel; American Idiot uses Green Day; and Mamma Mia! the songs of ABBA. In the world of film, we've seen a few of these as well. There's the Mamma Mia! adaptation, in addition to original movies like Moulin Rouge and Across the Universe. When I reviewed the latter in 2007, which employed the music of The Beatles, I wrote:

Roger Ebert, in his four-star review of the film, says the criticism that these aren't the Beatles singing original Beatles' tunes is unwarranted, that "Fred Astaire wasn't Cole Porter, either." But in a way, that kind of misses the point. In the excellent BBC documentary, titled here as Popular Song: Soundtrack of the Century, Elvis Costello makes the terrific insight that we don't have Gershwin's voice attached to any of his songs in the way we hear the Beatles or the Beach Boys when we think of their songs. The point is that the Beatles, along with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and a host of others represented a massive paradigm shift in the evolution of popular music: the songwriter as performer. Name any song by the Gershwins, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers & Hart, etc. and one person may immediately think Sinatra, another Crosby, yet another Astaire. Name "Johnny B. Goode," Chuck Berry's the only name that comes to mind, "Like a Rolling Stone," Bob Dylan, and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," the Beatles.

That's similar to how I feel here. Now I don't think any of these 80s rock anthems to be on par with the best of The Beatles catalogue, but hearing the songs we so fundamentally remember as the original recording make the proceedings feel like nothing more than glorified karaoke. This sub-genre seems to have reached its apotheosis at the peak of Glee's popularity, where the insertion of pop songs often need only be tenuously related to plot or character. (Half of the songs are also mashups, which undercut the effect of each song by jumping back and forth between each of the ones thrown together.) Often it rarely rises above kitsch and it's usually impossibly hard to take seriously.

But here's the thing about Rock of Ages: you shouldn't for a second take it seriously. And that's kind of its saving grace. It's unashamed in its campiness. My problem with the aforementioned Moulin Rouge and Across the Universe was how precious and pretentious they were. Rock of Ages instead is like the songs that populate it: loud and brash, but also simple, irreverent, and fun.

 

You can see the fun in some of the performances. Chief among them is Russell Brand, who is doing nothing more than acting like Russell Brand. Alec Baldwin can't sing worth a bit, but has a great rapport with Brand; and his friendship with Brand has both a funny and tender resolution. Hough and Boneta are appropriately naive and earnest about making it big in rock. And while Paul Giamatti is respected for his more serious work in movies like Sideways, American Splendor, or Win Win, he also has the ability to play the broad and obnoxious twit, the smarmy weasel who will do anything to get ahead.

One performance I did have an issue with is Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx. Cruise is a very good actor when he's in the right role. But this feels like stunt casting. His two strongest characteristics as an actor are his steely-eyed intensity (in action movies like the Mission: Impossible films or Minority Report) and his earnest vulnerability (like in Jerry Maguire). The best of his movies are able to combine the two (Magnolia) and he throws all of himself into them. What he doesn't do well is a sort of detached irony. Jaxx is too much of a caricature--of the insufferable rock star--and is so on purpose. Cruise can't throw himself into someone like that. Brand, funny enough, has made his career doing characters like these, especially his Aldous Snow from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek and is more adept at capturing the silliness of his own pomposity. This was a similar casting problem in Tropic Thunder, in which Cruise--with heavy makeup, bald cap, and fat suit--played the over-the-top studio exec. It seemed like Cruise was trying too hard (and it always looks like he's trying his hardest) versus the ease by which someone like Robert Downey Jr. played "the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude."

Altogether it's a guilty pleasure type of movie, which is how I feel about most of this era's music anyway. So, you know... No harm, no foul as they say. But it might be just as satisfying, if not more so, to merely listen to all the originals on Spotify.