Film Review: We Are Your Friends
Zac Efron adds depth to his angsty millennial DJ role in this coming-of-age film
At a seminal moment in the 1997 romantic drama As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson states in his psychiatrist’s office, “What if this is as good as it gets?" As movie lines go, this one was pretty fantastic, because it seemed to sum up a generation’s anxieties and a decade’s failures in one neat question. Of course, as all big-ticket Hollywood movies must, it went ahead and showed someone who has been on medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder for years, break a pattern (he steps on a crack on the pavement) and into a smile while doing it, just so viewers weren’t left feeling the emptiness that the question presaged.
Director Max Joseph who makes his feature film debut with We Are Your Friends, leaves the seminal question till the very end. It is one that will seem pertinent to millennials, replete with opportunity, yet anxious about not being as much of a success as they were told they could be: “Are we ever going to be better than this?"
The Zac Efron and Emily Ratajkowski starrer is a coming-of-age film about Cole, a 23-year-old DJ played by Efron, who lives with a friend, and spends all his time with him and two others. The gang of four lives tantalizingly close to Hollywood, Los Angeles, but proximity to that pinnacle of success and moolah heaven doesn’t imply that they’re getting any of it for themselves. There is plenty of alcohol, sex and drugs. A voice-over at the start of the film also describes the dead-beat, flattened-out town they live in, right behind the Hollywood hill. But then Efron meets James Reed (played by Wes Bentley, who does a blink-and-you-would-miss-it mixed-martial arts thingmajig despite his jaded alcoholic star DJ act) and is set on course correction, as all young heroes in bildungsromans usually are.
The plot is predictable, but hangs on a taut script. The lines are usually giveaways of what’s to follow, like when Bentley tells Efron, “You’re too young to know the meaning of the word irreparable." It’s a good line, but you know that Efron will soon know the meaning of that word. Later, when he’s making reparations, Bentley utters what is probably the most paternal of all his lines, “Hey, everyone knows you’re not a real person till 27." It’s a line that’s meant to soothe and forgive. Yet despite what it sounds like—aid to a youngster’s journey in self-awareness—there is a subplot where the hero is shown the “easy way out" that involves him selling his soul.
The film’s saving grace is Efron’s effortlessness in playing this part. It adds depth to what the film otherwise does: skim the surface of angst, and present it neatly in 96 minutes.
Perhaps the dilemma of making the wrong choice is one that anyone in their 20s and, dare we say, 30s, faces. The denouement shows Efron find his track, his answer, and his love. But like all big-ticket Hollywood films, it leaves you feeling mildly cheated.
Watch the film if you’re an Efron or Ratajkowski fan. Watch it if you like EDM. But don’t expect to find the answer to your life’s big questions.
We Are Your Friends released in theatres on Friday.
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