There’s a very good chance that how much you enjoy Rock of Ages will hinge on how much you enjoy any one of the following three things: a) (of course) ’80s hard rock, a la Def Leppard, Journey, Poison, Guns’n Roses, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, David Lee Roth, etc; b) recent musicals-turned-films such as High School Musical and Hairspray; or c) karaoke night.
If any or all of these sound like nothing but a good time, then within the first few minutes the film will feel just like living in paradise.
If, however, any or all of these sound more akin to the pain you’d feel during a trip to the dentist, you might want to rock elsewhere.
Ostensibly, Rock of Ages tells the story of small-town girl Sherrie (Julianne Hough, Footloose) and city boy Drew (Diego Boneta, TV’s 90210), how they meet, fall in love, break up, and find their way back to each other while chasing their dreams of stardom in and out of the Bourbon Room, the biggest rock club on the Hollywood Strip in 1987. In the background of that star-crossed love affair you have the Bourbon Room’s owner, Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin), and his ever-loyal second-in-command Lonny (Russell Brand) trying to save the club from financial ruin while also fending off the efforts of the newly-elected L.A. mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to rally the city’s conservative elements and clean up the Strip by getting the club shut down. Their plan to book the final performance of Arsenal and their notoriously eccentric rock-god lead singer, Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) leads to greater complications thanks to the machinations of Jaxx’s oily manager, (Paul Giamatti), who’s still looking out for his primary meal ticket in Jaxx while also searching for the next “big thing”, and possibly finding it in Drew.
Will Drew and Sherrie’s love survive “the spotlight” once Drew gets his shot? Will Dennis be able to save the Bourbon Room from bankruptcy and the picketing mob of church moms across the street waiting to tear the place down in the name of decency? These are the paltry plot threads that make up the film’s story; or more accurately, these are the unabashed clichés that the film’s script uses to provide bits of dialogue and context for the many, MANY ’80s songs that the cast sings and dances to throughout. That might sound like a condemnation when said of another film, but not so here because the hokum is entirely by design.
Rock of Ages is nothing if not reverent toward the energy, the spirit, and the theatricality of the material that inspired it and the stage production that the film is based on. Remember, this is the ’80s — it’s all about being over-the-top. Director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) and screenwriters Justin Theroux (Iron Man 2, Tropic Thunder), Chris D’Arienzo (who wrote the original book for “Rock of Ages” on stage) and Allan Loeb (Just Go With It, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps) seem to delight in honoring and embracing all of the absurdity and pedal-to-the-metal excess that we here thirty years later have come to identify with the ’80s Hard Rock scene.
The result is a screenplay that, at least through the film’s first act, drives headlong from one ’80s rock tune number to the next with sometimes just a few sentences spoken by the cast to connect them. In the second hour there are fewer songs and more dialogue to help move the plot along, but in truth these are the sections where the film’s otherwise exuberant energy flags, and you might find yourself hoping for the next song to start to pick things up again.
It must be mentioned that it’s not a seamless transition between stage and screen here. While retaining almost all of the Broadway jukebox musical’s most important songs and production numbers, Shankman and co. make a number of changes which take away from the film some of the considerable edge and darkness of the stage show. Characters are softened, plotlines are altered to provide for different outcomes, and by the end the film version feels much more like ’80s rock fantasy than the ’80s reality that the stage show depicted. Case in point: despite this being the ’80s, nary a word about cocaine use is mentioned on the part of any of the rockers depicted is mentioned throughout the film. If that’s not fantasy when talking about the ’80s and the entertainment scene, then I don’t know what is.
Does that make the whole thing feel shallow and silly at times? Absolutely. Does that matter? Not a whit.
The cast never falters in providing energy and enthusiasm to the proceedings. It’s clear everyone here is having a grand old time, most of them stepping out of their comfort zones to sing their own songs and play bigger-than-life, as though they were on stage and not on film. Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta are just sweet and charismatic enough to make you care about their rock’n roll love affair, even though you know exactly where its headed from the moment they first meet on the street in front of the Bourbon Room. If you’re not at least somewhat charmed by the pair crooning Foreigner’s “I’ve Been Waiting For a Girl Like You” to each other during their first date while overlooking the lights of L.A. from the “Hollywood” sign, then you’ve got a heart of stone, pure and simple. They aren’t a GREAT movie couple, but they do well enough, given the material.
Far more engaging and memorable are the supporting players here. Baldwin and Brand could possibly win a contest for “cutest couple” by the end of the film, while Zeta-Jones once again shows off the considerable singing and dancing skills and charisma that made her a showstopper in “Chicago.” Meanwhile, Mary J. Blige provides goosebumps-provoking vocals in her few scenes as Hollywood madam Justice Charlier; which is a good thing considering that to call her dialogue delivery in non-singing scenes “wooden” would be a disservice to all wood and lumber products. Since the songs are lip-synched and these are not, after all, professional singers for the most part, there is kind of a karaoke feel to some of the numbers, but again, everyone’s having so much fun with it all that you can easily put that feeling aside.
And what about Cruise’s performance, you ask? After all, it’s probably why you’re going to see the movie at all if you’re not familiar with the musical or have no particular affection for ’80s music. Clearly, Warner Bros. is building all of the movie’s promotion around the hope that the spectacle of Cruise playing a rocker in the molds of Axel Rose, Bret Michaels, and Keith Richards will inspire at the very least curiosity, and if that is what gets your butt in a theater seat, you will not be disappointed.
Whatever damage Cruise might have done to his reputation as a person off-screen years ago with his couch-jumping antics, one thing that’s never been questioned is his willingness to commit to a role with anything and everything necessary to sell it, and his turn as Stacie Jaxx is no exception. Reportedly, Cruise began singing five hours a day in preparation for the role, and his hard work is evident in his believably belting out songs like “Paradise City” and “Wanted Dead or Alive”, and the scenes where Jaxx performs on stage with Arsenal are as electric and entrancing as any you might have seen in your hair-band stadium rock days.
When not singing, Cruise simply fascinates as a rocker who seems at first to be so detached from reality that his naming of his pet baboon “Hey Man” is perfectly normal, and his everyday sex-and-booze saturated existence could be mundane and boring to him. The very-predictable revelation that there is, in fact, more to Jaxx than just assless chaps, demon-head codpieces, and incomprehensible ramblings about fire phoenixes, that this rock god may in fact be a man with a soul behind the sunglasses and beneath the tattoos, sweat, and sex appeal, is made believable only because Cruise sells it.
No doubt, fans and devotees of the original Rock of Ages stage production will cry foul once they see this version. Though they might grudgingly acknowledge the quality of the vocal performances and choreography, they will no doubt howl and decry the changes to the original show’s story and tone, which was much darker and more rooted in the true fates that often met young men and women who flocked to Hollywood chasing rock’n roll dreams in the drug-and-alcohol-drenched decadence that was the ’80s.
Pay those people no mind whatsoever. Rock of Ages is not perfect, by any means. But it is PURE: pure excess, pure ’80s nostalgia, pure cheese (intentionally), and pure rock’n roll fantasy, Most importantly, it’s pure fun, and it lives up to its tagline and the classic Poison song that inspired it: “Nothin’ But A Good Time.”
Score: 3 out of 5
Rock of Ages
Starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Malin Akerman, Mary J. Blige, Alec Baldwin, and Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx. Directed by Adam Shankman.
Running Time: 124 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, suggestive dancing, some heavy drinking, and language.