Lately there have been dozens of teenagers singing on your television and singing in the movies. Okay, to be more accurate it’s mostly twenty-somethings playing high school misfits, but I’m sure you know exactly what I mean. Even though the British are usually at the forefront of most musical movements, with Hunky Dory — the 2012 SXSW film which is finally getting a U.S. release — Welsh director Marc Evans attempts a specifically British version of High School Musical.
In the summer of 1976, Vivienne (Minnie Driver) is the new free-spirited music teacher of a school in Wales. In order to promote free expression in the hum-drum lives of her students, Vivienne decides to do a version of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest with current pop songs for the school summer musical. But Vivienne faces resistance from parents who don’t want their kids in it, faculty who don’t support the radical revisions, and general teenage emotional meltdowns. Along with that, as a new teacher Vivienne also has to learn the boundaries between being a friend to her students and being an authority.
If you read the preceding paragraph and thought, “I’ve definitely seen that movie before,” you’re not alone. Besides its setting, Hunky Dory is exactly like every “we have to save the school musical!” movie you’ve ever seen (and there has certainly been a lot of those in the last ten years). There is the handsome, troubled lead who is learning what love is. There is the gay student who is just coming to terms with his sexuality. There is the troublemaker who gets picked on for participating. There is the stuck-up, conservative teacher who thinks Vivienne is encouraging despicable behavior. There is the girl who feels self-conscious about her looks. My goodness, we hit on every single character type you’ve seen in these types of stories except for the overweight kid feeling sad about his or her weight.
What makes it more disappointing is that several interesting directions the movie could have gone in are dropped. There are two major plot points — one involving a cassette tape and one involving a fire — that have no proper resolution. Instead, Hunky Dory relies on the same tired teenage stereotypes and their same tired story arcs in order to show the audience just how monumentally important this high school musical is in their lives (there’s even one of those “Where Are They Now?” montages at the end to demonstrate just how much influence this Tempest on LSD musical extravaganza had on their future selves).
There is a cleverness to Hunky Dory, but not clever enough to keep it interesting for 2 hours because it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. I would have thought that the music would be the star here, especially since the kids are actually really talented, but there’s just not enough of it. Despite being promoted as a “glam rock musical,” the ensemble only performs a handful of David Bowie and ELO songs and few others (including, inexplicably, a very not-glam Beach Boys song). The lead, Davey (Aneurin Barnard), is perhaps the most talented of the whole cast (he also looks ridiculously like Elijah Wood‘s Frodo from Lord of the Rings) and I certainly don’t want to put down their collective musical abilities, but a film branded as a musical should have a lot more music and a lot less teenage moping (unless, of course, that moping is done through music). Yet even with all those scenes of teenage drama there is hardly any camaraderie among the characters, and each teenager’s story seems disconnected from the others. Driver’s character manages to hold much of the central narrative together, but if Hunky Dory is supposed to be about the defining moments in these kids’ lives, why so much focus on Driver’s career crisis?
I’m assuming if you’re a fan of Glee or movies like Pitch Perfect you could add a few more points to my rating, but I think even those fans are probably tired of school musical storylines and all their various required bits, even if Hunky Dory is set in 1976 Wales for a little variety. As far as independent British films go, Hunky Dory isn’t a good representation of what the UK has to offer. Like so many musical movements that began in the UK, I would’ve rather have seen something new in Hunky Dory rather than an American retread.
Rating: Hunky Dory is not as fun or entertaining as it seems to think it is (3.5/10).
Hunky Dory is set for a limited U.S. theatrical release beginning March 22 and is now available on VOD.
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