We Are Your Friends

Max Joseph’s first feature is sharpest when it stops telling a story and lectures. The set piece at its centre is about beats per minute, narrated over onscreen graphics: a DJ’s job, Cole says, is to get a crowd out of its head and into its body, starting at 125 to match a resting pulse before naming 128 the magic number. The other detachable sequence is a drug episode in an art gallery where the paintings climb out of their frames and the image becomes animation. Everything between them is familiar: the mentor, his girlfriend, the friends drifting into worse work. Shot in the San Fernando Valley, it was produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title and financed by France’s StudioCanal, with Warner Bros. buying North American rights later. The title comes from a 2006 Justice versus Simian track. Its release was brutal. It opened in 2,333 theatres, averaged 758 dollars per venue that weekend, the fourth worst debut then recorded above 2,000 screens, and took 3.6 million dollars in North America. A good fit if you want a track assembled from scratch and an argument about tempo, and can treat the plot as wallpaper. Not for viewers expecting Emily Ratajkowski’s character to have real standing; the triangle runs mainly between Zac Efron and Wes Bentley.