Battle of The Bands

EVERY year, thousands of hopefuls risk public ridicule to chase fame and fortune by singing their (tuneless) hearts out on The X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent.

The big screen has a long tradition of these wish-fulfilment fairy-tales about young men and women chasing their one moment in the spotlight, fuelled most recently by High School Musical and its spin-offs.

With Zac Efron hanging up his dancing shoes, Bandslam hopes to woo the same pre-teen crowd, charting the fortunes of a group of high-school misfits who strum, sing and drum for glory in their local battle of the bands.

Efron’s on-screen and real-life sweetheart Vanessa Hudgens is cast in a key role, which includes a full vocal workout in the grandstand finale.

Director and co-writer Todd Graff is in familiar territory, having previously made the 2003 low-budget musical Camp about the young wannabes at a summer school for the performing arts.

Here, he delivers a winning rites of passage story mixed with all of the usual ingredients (romance, bullying, a last-gasp victory snatched from the slavering jaws of defeat) without laying on the saccharine too thickly.

Music fan Will Burton (Connell) is picked on at school, so when he learns that his mother Karen (Kudrow) has landed a job in New Jersey, he is delighted to start anew in a different state.

As the new boy at Martin Van Buren High School, Will reinvents himself as a cool loner, concocting colourful stories about his errant father, who famously plays backing for A-list rock stars.

When Will learns about a high-profile battle of the bands, he thrills to the prospect of winning the trophy, only to discover that high-school hunk Ben Wheatly (Porter) is all but guaranteed the title with his band, Glory Dogs.

“Going up against Glory Dogs would be kind of like burning the American flag,” explains a classmate.

Unperturbed, Will joins forces with Ben’s songwriter ex-girlfriend Charlotte (Michalka), singer Sa5m (Hudgens) and a number of other misfits to write and perform an original song – and prove that anything is possible.

Bandslam rocks and rolls to a familiar song sheet, but Graff's film fizzes with infectious energy, matched by a charm and some droll dialogue that should easily win over older audiences too.

Connell is an endearingly vulnerable yet spirited hero, instantly winning our sympathy as he struggles to fit in by allowing one little white lie to take root and conceal his unhappy past.

Hudgens and Michalka excel at the mike, and Kudrow essays another steely single mother, who fearfully asks her son how his first day was and is told in no uncertain terms: “Lunch today was like a Nuremberg rally produced by MTV.”

Thankfully, the rest of Graff’s film is more upbeat.