Music and film are media in which the element of time is distorted. In film, the time it takes to watch the film intertwines with the (most often) truncated time line of the narrative. Flashbacks offer glimpses of the past in the present. The end of the film is the future of the moments that we witness throughout. Something similar can be said for music. It at once establishes temporality in the length of the song. It also transports us to different moments in which we’ve heard the song, limning the nostalgia factor.
This is the hand that David Chase plays in his new film Not Fade Away. Beginning with a black and white scene of a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards conversing on a train traveling through London, Chase works on our knowledge of the Rolling Stones – a band that might just defy temporality – and their imminent success.
Juxtaposed with this are the young Doug (John Magaro) and Eugene (Jack Huston), two New Jersey high schoolers who know they aren’t cool but embrace the “skinny frame” and “scuzzy complexion” of the anti-aesthetic counterculture that hears the Beatles for the first time only a mere three weeks after Kennedy is assassinated in 1963. Here, Chase offers the thesis that rock n’ roll, in its owned decade of the sixties, was more than the rhetorical generation of peace and love. It was a mix of chaos, marking rock n’ roll as both unifying and divisive.
This theme flows throughout Not Fade Away, but it is too often bogged down by its familiarity. At once Chase’s film cane be inspiring, but, mostly, it’s derivative. It includes the too-often-included tropes of any music-era based film. Some cinematic Madlib cliches are offered below:
A freak accident impedes the anointed lead singer, and the shy drummer…
This eventually leads to …
Doug, who returns from college with long hair and dressed like he “just got off the boat,” and his conservative father Pat’s (James Gandolfini) relationship can best be described as …
Doug and his friends’ views on the persisting war in Vietnam are …
A motorcycle owned by the scorned former member is introduced to the lead guitarist who is an inexperienced rider and …
Doug’s girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) has opinions about the band and this leads to …
While a film like Almost Famous tackles some of these same cliches, there is a charm within Crowe’s film that fashions a handful of likeable characters among the parasites. In contrast, the characters in Not Fade Away are all fairly condescending, snarky, and, overall, dislikable. Even Gracie, the one character who, apparently, is the most earnest, acts predictably by the end of the film, a moment that(spoiler alert) finds she and Doug moving out to California and heading to a party in Hollywood. As you watch the film – or any film like this – there are only two options:
1) It’s around 1969, so they could end up at the home of the Tate’s or LaBianca’s, which would certainly and powerfully elucidate the dirge of the sixties and its hurtle into the violence of the 1970’s
2) The inevitable conclusion to an inorganic argument based on Doug’s belief about forty-five minutes prior in the film that Gracie is just a conceited groupie who seeks out the star of the band – despite her denial and their perfunctory fight over blowjobs performed on other men while they were in high school.
I would have much preferred the former as I never would have seen it coming…at least not thirty minutes away. And while it would have been a stretch, it would have been something new.
Despite the above observations, Chase does try to subtly inject moments that clearly document the changing sixties and the aforementioned paradox related to rock n’ roll. With Doug’s emulation of other rock stars, they are merely playing catch up. They can be other people on stage, but they are hardly themselves each time they sing “Time is on my Side,” or “Eat out my Heart.” Originality persists on television, but not in the basements and at holiday parties featuring garage bands.
He also notes androgyny and the intermingling looks of men and women. Doug wears Cuban boots, which Pat feels are more akin to high heels. As the movie progresses, everyone’s hair grows longer and their shirts become cleaner. Like Jagger, they are petite and clean, the opposite of Pat whose Pep Boys company makes money through dirtied hands fixing transmissions. Most powerfully, Chase pithily looks at the generational gap in education. Fathers send their sons to school to have a better life, but the education that progeny received creates both an air of pretention and resentment.
For everything Not Fade Away does well, it very often trims its potential arcs, leaving frayed tangents that are underdeveloped and ultimately forgotten.
