Review of Bandslam (2009) by Chads. — 13 Aug 2009

The fact that "Bandslam" rocks at all is a miracle, but it does, in spite of its need to corner the teen girls market. It's a charming indie that allow itself to be hijacked by a Disney sensibility, culminating in the decidedly unrocking song that Can't Go On, I Will Go On plays at the Bandslam competition.

It sounds completely dislocated from the sort of music that Will(Gaelen Connell) would endorse. The movie feels compromised, as if a deal was struck. In exchange for a wider release, the songs had to suck.

The songs don't always suck though, and that's the tragedy of it all. If the filmmaker stayed true to his indie roots(he has the cred; he made "Camp"), the Sa5m-led nonet(a 9-piece band) would have tried to top the truly galvanizing indie-rocker which Charlotte(Alyson Michalka), the head cheerleader gone riot grrl, fronts after Will assembles the band in its most indelible incarnation.

Musically, that was the film's last hurrah. To win the competition, the band's brainchild tells Charlotte they need to find the right song. What the pom-pom girl comes back to Will with seems straight out of "High School Musical", but he loves it, inexplicably, a song that no respectable David Bowie devotee would ever own up to loving.

Although the music stops making sense, "Bandslam" survives the encroaching blandness of market-driven teen pop, because the three principal leads never stop making sense. "Bandslam" plays like a loving tribute to John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club", in which the utopia created in that library, lives on through the next day in the school hallways and beyond.

In "Bandslam", the cheerleader and the nerd become friends. (Vanessa Hudgens could be an update of the Ally Sheedy character.) What if Claire(Molly Ringwald) didn't forget about Brian(Anthony Michael Hall)? Like the beloved 1985 film, Charlotte tells Will that their friendship is an experiment, but unlike that classic of the teen movie genre, it never panders.

And still, "Bandslam" is an enormously appealing "let's put on a show" sort of movie that actually feels, to quote another Simple Minds song, "alive and kicking".