School of Rock. Directed by Richard Linklater. Paramount, 2003.
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, by Devin McKinney. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.
Rock is dead they say,
Long live rock!
--The Who (1972)
Movies about rock music have been very hit-or-miss, so when a new one comes around it’s time to check for signs of life in the genre. The poster for School of Rock doesn’t seem to offer much promise: the cartoonish Jack Black stands with a guitar in mid-power chord, legs splayed open at us. Behind him are a bunch of cherubic preppie-type children who have put on various forms of rock “fashion,” and above it all flies the title of the film in the same font used for the logo of Rolling Stone, a magazine several decades out of any relevance.
The plot premise seems no more promising: a mere formula film. It’s one of those feel-good “empowering” pictures, this time featuring cute--but overly smart and straight--kiddies learning to loosen up by playing rock music. The kids are under the tutelage of Dewey Finn (Jack Black’s role), a slacker who serves society “by rocking,” However, his “rocking” has failed to pay his bills, so he fakes his way into a substitute teacher’s job at an elite prep school where he enlists his musically gifted students to become his backing band for a Battle of the Bands competition. Think of Dead Poets Society minus the dire solemnity (which actually wouldn’t leave much).
However, the film has received more critical attention than one might guess, proving that auteur theory dies hard. Richard Linklater directed the movie, and his previous independent hits include Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and the animated philosophy seminar, Waking Life. However, focusing on School of Rock as a “Linklater film” is problematic for any auteurist approach: for one reason, it’s one of his few films he didn’t write himself (Mike White did, who plays Dewey’s wimpy roommate). Also, the film is really a showcase for Jack Black’s manic performance, which dominates here unlike the ensemble approach found in Linklater’s other films.1 Still, it’s likely that Linklater’s name helped the film garner the critical attention to rank it as #14 on Film Comment's Top Films of the Year (right behind the latest from Abbas Kiarostami).
Next page: "It makes me feel dizzy"
