Detroit Rock City

Kevin Smith meets Wayne’s World (1992) is not a bad way to represent Detroit Rock City, a comedy about the desperate adventures of quartet of high school students to get to see their idols, KISS, live in concert in Detroit in 1978.

The film is often crass with plenty of potty-mouthed dialogue but nevertheless quite funny with some effective physical comedy (the film’s opening sequence and a copious barf by Edward Furlong's Hawk at an amateur strip night hosted by porn-star Ron Jeremy are particularly good in this respect) and samples of just about every head-banging cock-rock hit of the era from bands like Thin Lizzy, Van Halen, AC/DC and, of course, KISS, themselves all make for a good time.

Whilst this is a middling achievement the film is more than yet another low-brow comedy about teenage slackers with Rifkin having expended quite a bit of energy in re-creating the pop-cultural context for the story. This is effectively signalled in the montage of imagery that underpins the opening credits which alludes to everything from Watergate to Charlies’ Angels whilst writer Carl Dupré quietly peppers his script with references to the tastes of the time. The main narrative, which essentially adheres to the “road trip” format, plays with the era’s battle between metal and disco and thus the story finds various pretexts to oppose the one to the other, all convincingly and good humouredly done.

Unfortunately the film loses its mojo in the latter part when it wanders into a cute teen romance dalliance between Jam (Sam Huntington) and his classmate, Beth (Melanie Lynskey), and a gratuitous and uninspired satirization of Christian opponents of the Devil’s music (this had already been well-realized with the character of Jam's chain-smoking mother, played by Lin Shaye) before it delivers the usual feel-good ending with an in-concert appearance by the band re-creating their glory days, such as they were. 

 

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