Smug young bucks in a club of their own
We Are Your Friends
15 Cert, 96min
★★ ★★★
Dir Max Joseph Starring Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski, Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Shaffer, Johnny Weston
Will a more chillingly titled film be released this year than We
Are Your Friends? If the heroes of Max Joseph’s club-hopping drama were so much as casual acquaintances, you’d probably throw your mobile phone down a ravine and make for the nearest cave.
It’s a film about the tensions between ambition and loyalty that arise when someone’s on the brink of “making it big”: in this case, Cole Carter, an aspirant DJ played by Zac Efron, who finds himself unexpectedly doted on by a veteran record-spinner called James (Wes Bentley).
Cole’s three wheeling-dealing buddies from the San Fernando Valley – the dusty, flat expanse on the wrong side of the Hollywood sign – are mostly delighted for him. The test of loyalty instead concerns James’s beautiful girlfriend and PA Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski), with whom Cole hamfistedly flirts in a nightclub before realising her connection to his mentor.
Everything you’d expect to happen does, with Cole bouncing between increasingly important gigs, risky money-making schemes and forbidden romantic liaisons, all the while searching for the unique sound that will make him a star.
The script, co-written by first-time director Joseph and Meaghan Oppenheimer, has a lot to say about the mechanics of dance music, but the music itself is horribly deployed, and there isn’t a single sequence that gets you bobbing in your seat.
As a multi-sensory exploration of club culture the film doesn’t hold a candle to Mia Hansen-Løve’s wispy, elliptical Eden, its reality-bending animations look like cheap gimmicks next to The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s rapturously doodled interludes, and its young bucks would last for around 30 seconds
in Straight Outta Compton. But let’s not get too bogged down in unflattering comparisons: it’s a smug, abrasive mess in its own right.