3 stars out of 5
OK, David Chase, you’ve gotten the veiled autobiography out of your system. Can we maybe get a Sopranos movie now?
With Not Fade Away, he was partially there, anyway. You’ve got James Gandolfini playing, well, Tony Soprano if he worked at Pep Boys. Silvio is the film’s music supervisor. Eugene Pontecorvo shows up in a small role. And yes, the story is set in New Jersey.
But nobody gets whacked, and there are no talking fish. This is a generally enjoyable coming-of-age story set in the 1960s (when Chase came of age!) about an awkward young drummer (hey, Chase was a drummer) who is thinking about film school (yup).
In the lead role is a young Howard Stern—wait, it’s not Howard Stern? Anyway, the actor never quite makes the character likable enough, and that’s a big problem here. We need to be rooting for this guy, and I wasn’t really feeling it.
In addition to the coming-of-age tale, we also get a That Thing You Do!-esque “garage band trying to make it big” story. And you can practically hear Little Steven begging Chase to push his rock-history-for-kids curriculum, stressing the blues’ influence on rock and roll and how that morphed into punk (even though that last bit doesn’t quite fit the film’s time frame).
I think the autobiographical nature causes some additional trouble here. There are plot developments so random and seemingly extraneous that it felt like they must come directly from Chase’s life. And also—especially early in the film—he jumps from school break to school break and it’s a little difficult to know how much time is passing. That may be Chase knowing his own life a little too well and not conveying it to us, or perhaps it’s one of the challenges in going from episodic TV to feature films.
I know I have a lot of gripes, but there is much to like as well, certainly if you’re a music buff. (Various E Streeters on the soundtrack! Smithereens names in the credits too. And Bobby Bandiera, who was on the short list to replace Little Steven in the E Street Band but lost out to Nils Lofgren.) There are many laughs—Molly Price is very funny as the mom. Bella Heathcote is extremely attractive. And there is something very comforting about an angry James Gandolfini in a suburban Jersey home. Now if we could just get Pie-O-My into the mix….
Jack Silbert, curator