Rock and Roll Multiplex — Begging for Backstage Film
by Brady Dale
The most rockstar entrance of any movie has to be 40 minutes into Rock and Roll High School when The Ramones roll up playing “I Just Want To Have Something To Do” out of the back of a Cadillac. Wielding guitar, drumsticks, tight blue jeans and leather jackets, they pull up to a venue where a crowd of fans lose their minds dancing to the music.
Three years ago I finally saw this 1979 masterpiece. A film by Allan Arkush that served as an extended music video for the punk pioneers, two years before MTV’s first broadcast.
Taking in the whole epic one night it hit me: Bands have quit making movies like these, and it makes no sense.
Once upon a time the biggest musical acts would make films to feature their songs and there’s no good reason they should have stopped. So, here are seven synopses for musician fronted flicks that should happen immediately if not sooner:
In the category of…
MOST OBVIOUS (why hasn’t she done this already?)
Taylor Swift Is (Almost) Over It. Let’s say, the film opens and some guy dumps her. She cries. She pets her cat. She calls her friends and: They. Go. Out. At every club, someone recognizes Swift and persuades her to get up on stage and she “reluctantly” does so only to totally get into it every time — it’s a greatest hits album on the silver screen. At the end she hugs her friends and feels better. Money is printed. Done.
(Yes, Swift is now engaged, but I doubt her fans would care if she played her single era on screen. And she already proved with her Eras Tour film that her fans would come to theaters. She should do it again and go a bit deeper this time.)
In the category of…
COULD BE KIND OF AWESOME (Jack, call me)
Jack White in Listen. To. Me. Obviously: White is going to make a revenge film. It opens with him in a succinct sequence where he falls in love and then nerdy-looking Jack is brushed aside a scene or two later by some Bradley Cooper type. End Act One. From then on, White stalks the guy who stole his lady love and he starts a band. The band is perfectly designed to appeal to just this guy. White is so different in his rockstar incarnation that his enemy never makes the connection. At the apex of the film he is White’s biggest fan. The nemesis gets invited to an after-party at one of White’s shows where his hero actually murders him in front of everyone. White then forces all his bandmates to help him cover it up. There are no good guys. Call the sequel Blood Pact.
In the category of…
SHE SHOULD DO SOMETHING (but probably not this)
Billie Eilish Saves the Skate Park, in which Eilish plays a pre-fame version of herself. Her friends have built themselves a network of ramps in some Los Angeles orbiting a post-industrial suburb, but developers are coming in to bulldoze it. She thinks maybe they can raise the money to save it if they put on shows for skaters around the area. She starts doing some of her songs and electricity fills rooms of punky teens. By the end, she’s being swept away in fame and can hardly remember why she even started making music.
In the category of…
TOO EXPENSIVE TO MAKE MONEY (but cult thing for sure)
The Decemberists turn “The Mariner’s Revenge” into a film. If you’re not familiar: the song is an 8:45 second epic from 2005’s Picaresque which the indie rock band’s fans live for. With lyrics like: “Find him, bind him, tie him to a pole and break his fingers to splinters...” In it, one man meets another in the belly of a whale, and tells him how his mother made him swear on her deathbed to find him and kill him for leaving her forlorn. In this version, Colin Meloy starts a musical group in order to make his way around olden times England, until they finally find the man and book passage on a ship, following him to America. The ship sinks. Cue the whale.
In the category of…
SIMPLICITY IS A BEAUTIFUL THING
Kendrick Lamar in Nobody Pray For Me. Lamar is in the studio, making the next album, but things aren’t quite clicking. The film follows him frustrated by day and by night hitting clubs and parties and trying out his rhymes in progress. In most cases, he makes some kind of breakthrough getting out among the people. At the end of the film, no big reveal; he just hits the studio and it flows. He’s made something worth putting out. Roll credits.
In the category of…
JUST AS EXACTLY AS ON THE NOSE AS IT SHOULD BE
Jenny Lewis in Music Is for Witches. Lewis wakes up one morning next to the love of her life, goes to brunch with her friends and realizes how many ladies she knows are sadly alone. She sits down to make a list and comes up with a half dozen that just haven’t found the one for no good reason. Well it turns out that Lewis’ character has magical powers and she’s going to do something about it. There’s a catch, though: She needs to sing to work her spells. So in a variety of restaurants, night clubs and maybe even a city downtown, Lewis charms someone into giving her the floor and she croons out a song while the perfect mark is hypnotized into falling for each of her lonesome gal pals in turn.
In the category of…
THEY WANT IT THIS WAY
The Black Keys in Takes Me Back. The band is in the studio one day just trying to capture those 70s vibes, and Dan Auerbach hits a riff so sick they actually go back in time (it doesn’t need to make sense). Finding themselves in their favorite era, they tour around the world playing with all the legendary acts, covering songs and letting their heroes hear the future. No one worries about time loops or contradictions. This is not that kind of film. In the end, they never return. Time-traveling Auerbach dies happy in 2001, just before his younger self releases Thickfreakness. So meta.
(These ideas are all based on current megastars, but I actually think that a smaller band who scraped some funds together and found a director might find a film could help them break out. One of my favorite smallish bands, Wolf Alice, kind of did it with their pandemic album, Blue Weekend, but that was honestly just a bit too weird.)
Bring It Back
So, right. In an era where music just isn’t making money like it used to, the biggest acts could make films at relatively low budgets and still turn out hoards of popcorn popping fans. It makes no sense that this genre has died on the vine.
Maybe the problem is that we just haven’t named the genre that’s gone missing, so let’s call it Backstage Film.
Elvis may be the most famous musician to bridge film and music. The King did 33 films, but his most famous was probably 1957’s Jailhouse Rock, his third movie, where his character goes to the big house and discovers a hidden talent for song.
The Beatles did several as well. The first two are probably the most iconic, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). The first is very nearly a straight up documentary of just... being the Beatles. It is fictionalized, but no one was exactly stretching themselves here. Help! gets much weirder (they are trying to record an album while mad scientists and cultists are after them).
Then in 1968 Jack Nicholson produced TV’s Beatles stand-in, The Monkees, as they make Head. I don’t know how to say what Head is other than: God bless Peter Tork.
Prince gives us Purple Rain (1984), and somehow the Vatican has not sainted him for urging people to purify themselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. This gem makes Prince into Prince.
Also that year we see Stop Making Sense, but that’s not Backstage Film. It’s just a (really amazing) concert committed to film.
We don’t see a lot more Backstage Film after Purple Rain. Nevertheless there are plenty of films about musicians to follow. Take 1987’s The Return of Bruno featuring Bruce Willis as a fictional R&B star. It’s not bad! But Bruno’s not real.
In 1991’s The Doors, Val Kilmer plays Jim Morrison so memorably that more people picture Kilmer when they think of Morrison than the man himself these days. The same year The Commitments comes out, about a group of down and out working class folks in Ireland who put together an Irish soul band that just can’t get along. People loved this film about a band that broke up.
Almost Famous (2000), Josie and the Pussycats (2001), Walk the Line (2005), Crazy Heart (2009), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)... you see where this is going.
Confession: I know Mariah Carey made Glitter (2001) and Britney Spears made Crossroads (2002), but I honestly have no idea what happens in these flicks, however reading each one’s IMDB pages now I realize that I definitely should. Still, that was an era ago.
Film is about sound, character and spectacle harmonized, but Hollywood has overcorrected for spectacle and overindexed for the verisimilitude of the impossible. Certain people, though, (see: rockstars) are in and of themselves a special effect that can rival helicopters exploding and monsters blasting fire.
And music itself can really breathe when a movie gives it the floor. Yes it is a dish best served live, but even the greatest star one day gives his final concert. A musician can do worse than to document their craft in a way that will hold the attention of human eyes such that they sit quietly in a room and listen, really listen, to a recording made in high fidelity and delivered over a theatrical quality sound system.
One element that’s important to note about these movies is this: music is integral but you wouldn’t call them musicals (that’s why that’s not the genre’s name). Two people don’t break into song to tell each other they are in love while strangers begin dancing in the background. In Backstage Film, making music is a natural part of the plot and songs themselves don’t need to pertain to the film’s events.
These things don’t need to be complicated. The point is to craft a thin little story that gives you and yours an excuse to string some great songs together.
That’s what Rock and Roll High School did. It is entirely driven by a panic engendered in a little town by a band of punks doing a one-night show. It ends with a high school exploding.
Though, come to think of it, maybe that’s why these movies stopped getting made? It’s hard to think of a more rock-and-roll ending than that.
Brady Dale is the author of SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy. Find him on Substack writing at Front Stage Exist and follow him on X @BradyDale.
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