ROCK STAR []
Charming, wittily cynical heavy-metal comedy. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R (language). At the 42nd Street E Walk, the Orpheum, the First and 62nd Cinemas, others.
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EASILY one of the most enjoyable big-budget Hollywood movies to come along in a while, “Rock Star” is an unexpected pleasure.
It makes ironic fun of rock ‘n’ roll’s traditional pretensions to authenticity, danger and rebelliousness, while retaining affection for the music, the performers and the fans.
This is particularly impressive, given that the musical subgenre “Rock Star” fixes on is mid-’80s hair-band, stadium rock – depicted here as a big, cynical business, conducted according to timeworn but calculated conventions.
Even the sexual excesses of its stars are part of the packaging necessary to get teenage boys to buy records.
But somehow director Stephen Herek and screenwriter John Stockwell deploy their irony in such a way that you never feel contempt for those, like protagonist Chris Cole (Mark Wahlberg), who worship rock gods.
And just as important, you never lose sight of why the whole scene – music, spectacle, orgies – is so appealing, especially if you’re a white kid from a blue-collar, rust-belt town like Chris and his girlfriend, Emily (Jennifer Aniston).
Chris is in his early 20s, lives with his parents and works as a copy machine repairman when he’s not singing with his band, Blood Pollution. The latter is a tribute band (not a cover band, as Chris always points out) that plays only the music of fictitious British heavy-metal legends Steel Dragon.
Chris is obsessed with ensuring that Blood Pollution’s renditions of Steel Dragon songs are exactly right. His fellow band members, especially guitarist Rob (Timothy Olyphant from “Go”), think, with some justice, that this obsession is crazy. They all want to play their own songs one day.
But it’s Chris’s obsessive mimicry and his outstanding voice that get him an out-of-the-blue audition to replace his hero, Bobby Beers (Jason Flemyng from “Snatch”), lead singer of the real Steel Dragon.
And as if by magic, Chris suddenly has the adulation and unlimited sexual access of the man he worshipped.
One of several amusing, smart things about “Rock Star” is the way both Chris and Emily remain relatively unfazed by the decadence of rock-star life. Contrary to music-movie cliché, when both are seduced by others at an orgy – depicted for once as genuinely sexy – it doesn’t shatter their relationship.
Another strength of the movie is its subtle, deliberately ambivalent take on the ideal of originality in pop cultural myths. Then there’s the way it makes clear that the kind of behavior fetishized in today’s college campuses as “transgressive” gender-bending doesn’t in the least upset the ordinary folk of Pittsburgh in the mid-’80s – certainly not Chris’ supportive parents, colleagues in the local choir or the steelworkers in Blood Pollution’s audience.
(Of course, it never occurs to them that a long-haired, mascara-wearing rock singer might be anything but exuberantly heterosexual.)
Walhberg brings to his role the simple likability he had in “Boogie Nights” and “Three Kings.”
Aniston plays Emily as a working-class version of her Rachel character on TV’s “Friends,” and it works just fine.
But it’s the supporting performances that catch your eye, like Flemyng’s Bobby Beers, Timothy Spall’s (“Topsy Turvy”) terrific turn as Steel Dragon’s cynical road manager and Dominic West’s (“28 days”) incarnation of Kirk Cuddy, the ruthless leader of the band.