The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll (3/10)

December 8th, 2011

Like a moth to flame I’m inexorably drawn to moves about music and musicians, and unfortunately I tend to suffer the same charred fate. Rock stars on film have been shafted for decades now, with very few exceptions, and The Perfect Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll is not one of these exceptions.

The music mag interviewer casts a disgusted eye over Lost Soulz lead singer Spyder, twenty plus years after his band’s debut album broke all records for first-album sales figures, and asks where it all went wrong. Ah, my friend, Spyder (Kevin Zegers) replies, it all goes back to...

1991, and Spyder’s band are looking for songs for the difficult third album. He returns to his home town to hook up with Eric (Jason Ritter), ex-guitarist and now high-school music teacher. Eric looks up through his grunge-era fringe at the stereotypically-clad frontman now sitting on one of his desks and sighs. Things used to be different, they agree, but here’s an opportunity to get back together one more time. Such an opportunity cannot be missed. If this is going to be done, though, it’s going to be done Eric’s way. No limo and flight to get cross country to LA, no indeed. Instead, Eric says that the band should travel in Augie West’s RV, to get a chance to see the country and stop off along the way for some impromptu gigs.

Spyder’s not down with it, and neither is the band’s manager Rose (Taryn Manning). I say manager, I mean third corner of a love triangle, of course. What she knows about managing you could write on the back of a postage stamp in ten-foot letters. So, we’ll call her a manager, although groupie would be a better description, and her job is to be a) pissed off at travelling so slowly across country and b) to have conflicted thoughts about the two main men. I’m expecting Google searchers to land here not for a critical review of the movie but just to discover whether she goes topless (she does).

So the band head off and get up to the sorts of things road movies lay out for us. Random encounters, ex-girlfriends and jam sessions are the order of the day here, all designed by writer/director Scott D. Rosenbaum to at first separate the two main men and then ultimately unite them. Peter Fonda, as Augie, is the best thing about the movie, and when that’s the case you know you’re in trouble. He drives, gives life lessons and music quizzes to the band, all of which Spyder fails miserably. There’s a lesson to be had here: don’t buy records from bands who have no idea about music.*

Desperately searching for something to recommend about this film, I can only point to a jam session the metal-rockers have with a bunch of old blues guys (these are real musicians, featuring members of Howlin’ Wolf’s band and Muddy Waters’ band too) but a couple of minutes in a 90-minute movie is clutching at straws. All this musical interlude does is to remind us how plasticky the Lost Soulz brand of shock-metal rock is. (Their songs, incidentally, were written by Steve Conte, who spent five minutes with the reformed New York Dolls in 2004.) If the music is shambolic, the coke-sniffing, Russell Brand dressalike Spyder is even more so, and the less said about the two non-main men members of the band the better. My hunt for musician dramas continues. Move along, Colin, there’s nothing to see here.