Detroit Rock City

A comedy set in America in 1978. Four high school students have a band. They rehearse in a garage and nobody listens to them. All of them worship the same band: KISS. There is a concert in Detroit. They have the tickets. A problem arises. Jam's mother finds the tickets and burns them. She is devoutly religious. She considers the band satanic and enrols her son in a boarding school. From there the film is a story of travelling. The four drive to Detroit. They have no tickets. They have to find a way into the concert. They scatter on the way. Each falls into a separate line. One tries to earn money at a strip club. One enters a radio competition. One meets a girl at a church. One fights with disco fans. The narrative runs these lines in parallel. What the narrative is interested in is not music but belonging: its idea is that the boys' devotion to one band is their only identity and that they belong nowhere else. The period detail is dense. Clothes, cars, hair, radio, and the conflict between disco and rock. The humour is coarse and in the shape of the period's comedies. The last section is the concert. KISS are on stage and the band members play themselves. That section was shot like a real concert. The mother is the narrative's most one-dimensional element and the film never complicates her. The music comes from the charts of the period. Adam Rifkin directed. Edward Furlong, Giuseppe Andrews, James DeBello, Sam Huntington and Lin Shaye are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes late-1990s American teen comedy and 1970s rock culture. Who it is not for: anyone looking for subtlety; the narrative moves like a run of sketches and most of the jokes are cheap.