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Matinee Melee: ‘The Rocker’ gets personal

By: Holly Leber
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By: Casey Phillips
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Casey Phillips: As the resident music reporter, I have written about my love of music movies in the past, and as such, I tend to hold them to a high standard. While I don’t think “The Rocker” is the next “Almost Famous” or “This Is Spinal Tap,” it definitely has some funny moments, including a brief cameo by former Beatles drummer Pete Best.

It was interesting to watch Rainn Wilson, who most people know as Dwight Schrute, the no-nonsense lapdog from “The Office,” acting like an absolute buffoon with a performance that includes a nearly continuously bared midriff and a pivotal scene involving nude drumming, a webcam and YouTube. The physical comedy of this role isn’t always well executed (like a recurring slapstick bit of hitting his head in a low-ceiling attic), but on the whole, he really dove into this role.

Holly Leber: Between the bared midriff, the bared backside (and Wilson is not a taut 25-year-old), the hair-band hair and the profuse flop sweat, no one can accuse Wilson of being too vain, that’s for sure. He threw himself into the role like his character threw a drumstick at a high school kid.

I think the movie is supposed to be about doing what you love, following your dreams, being good to your friends and living in the present. And it is, in a sense. To its credit, “The Rocker” avoids an excessive amount of schlocky moments. But the real lesson that may be taken away is, I fear, if you want to be famous, drop your pants on YouTube.

Casey: That’s an excellent point. This movie does ape YouTube videos like the “Numa Numa” guy (the “Naked Drummer” in this film) to great effect. I appreciated how the film’s characters each had varying degrees of sympathetic depth to them. Fish, who was tossed out of the band he loved just as they made it into the big leagues, surrounds himself with young bandmates who have similar, if cliché, personal issues.

Emo lead singer Curtis (Teddy Geiger) writes angst-ridden poetic lyrics as a way to cope with abandonment issues, a practice Fish culls with a great bit of dialogue en route to a show. Punk-rock girl Amelia (Emma Stone) suffers from poor self-esteem, despite being a real looker. The best of the bunch, however, was Matt Gadman (Josh Gad), Fish’s overweight, nerdy nephew who is just looking for a little overdue recognition from the opposite sex. Debut writer Ryan Jaffe puts this band of misfits into the same boat (tour bus), and the ways they cheer each other up are more than a little heartening. By the end of the movie, I was cheering (silently) for them all.

Holly: I was too. These characters were all good kids; I wanted them all to get what they wanted (and to not end up swimming the Fish path of living for what never happened). Having never been in a band, I can’t say for sure whether the three teens had a good “band vibe,” but they did play well off each other and held their own in scenes with Wilson. All three are relative newcomers; Gad had a small part in “21,” Stone was in “Superbad” and double plays it this weekend with both “The Rocker” and “The House Bunny,” and Geiger is better known as a musician. He hit Top 40 in 2006 with “For You I Will (Confidence)” off his debut album, “Underage Thinking,” and is the credited performer on nine of the 12 songs on the soundtrack.

Despite the title of the film, however, the music doesn’t exactly rock. It pebbles, maybe. It’s not bad music; there’s nothing offensively terrible about it. It’s just the sort of banal, vanilla pop music that would probably play in the background of a teen soap opera or a Lifetime movie of the week.

Casey: It’s funny, but as much as this movie is about the music, it doesn’t really matter that that is one of its weaker elements. As is pointed out early on, there is no other band out there with a lineup as dissimilar as that of A.D.D. (the band’s name). That does hurt the credibility a bit, but the fact that they’re so different and still manage to engage the audience speaks volumes. A great band movie this film is not, but its web of personal relationships more than makes up for it, I think.

Holly: Despite a few aforementioned uncomfortable sight gags (though what can you expect from the director of “The Full Monty”), this is really a very nice movie at the core. Each of the characters got some good interactions with the others. I found a moment in which Amelia encourages Matt to have more confidence around girls to be quite touching, and there are some jabs at the ghosts of music past, including ’80s hair bands and the dangers of lip-synching.

This is Wilson’s first big headlining role, and while “The Rocker” isn’t about to change anyone’s life, he does show that he has what it takes to step out of the office (on summer hiatus, of course) and on to more movie posters.

Perhaps with more clothing the next time around.

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