DETROIT ROCK CITY (New Line) Starring: Edward Furlong, Sam Huntington, James DeBello, Giuseppe Andrews, Lin Shaye, Melanie Lynskey, Natasha Lyonne, KISS. Screenplay: Carl V. Dupre. Producers: Barry Levine, Gene Simmons and Kathleen Haase. Director: Adam Rifkin. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, drug use, adult themes, nudity, violence, sexual situations) Running Time: 95 minutes.
By any objective standard -- assuming the term isn't meaningless as it applies to film criticism -- DETROIT ROCK CITY is pretty inexcusable stuff. The humor sticks fairly consistently to drugs, alcohol, and other undesirable teen behavior. The Catholic Church is a constant target for insults, with priests variously portrayed as larcenous or lecherous. The four principal characters have little or no personality, and aren't terribly sympathetic. It's a frantically paced effort, the infantile gags thrown around with a "quantity beats quality" mentality. A sensible adult human being clearly would be well-advised to hurl himself as far from this film as possible.
Unless, of course, that adult human being happens to have been a member of the KISS Army in 1978. That's when this nostalgic teen comedy is set, sending its four garage band-mate protagonists -- Hawk (Edward Furlong), Jam (Sam Huntington), Trip (James DeBello) and Lex (Giuseppe Andrews) -- on a trip from their Ohio home to Detroit, where they will do anything to score tickets to a concert by the band they adore: KISS. The quartet find themselves caught up in various rowdy misadventures as they try to get into the Cobo Hall show, including feuding with disco-lovers, entering strip contests, and trying to escape the wrath of Jam's fanatically religious mother (Lin Shaye).
Director Adam Rifkin certainly took many of his cues for DETROIT ROCK CITY from the seminal film about high schoolers desperately seeking tickets to a hot band's concert, Paul Bartel's Ramones love-in ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. There are far worse models for a film of this kind. DETROIT ROCK CITY is a dumb film, but it's a dumb film with such high energy and such a shamelessly low-brow sensibility that it feels like exactly the kind of film AMERICAN PIE wanted to be. Teenage viewers may be content to snigger at the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll gags, but the cartoonish delivery of those gags makes them more fun than they have any right to be.
Then again, I viewed DETROIT ROCK CITY through some fairly rose-tinted spectacles. Though sporadically guffaw-inducing as a teen sex farce, it's far more appealing as a pure nostalgia trip for a 30-something ex-headbanger. The soundtrack, though heavy on the KISS tunes, also delivers Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy and the aforementioned Ramones, not to mention the occasional disco selection. The 70's icons -- 8-track tapes, Stretch Armstrong action figures and Farrah Fawcett posters among them -- set just the right atmosphere. But Carl V. Dupre's script is best appreciated by those who spent their adolescence fighting off the scorn of the "KISS sucks" contingent, playing air guitar to Ace Frehley solos and dreaming of attending a true rock spectacle. It's filled with throwaway KISS references only a true fan could love, like Trip's ironic, pre-"I Was Made for Lovin' You" insistence that "KISS would never do some bull**** disco song." In all the ways that count, you really did have to be there.
It would be easy enough to begin and end with the idea that I was bored and/or repulsed by DETROIT ROCK CITY, annoyed by the projectile vomiting humor and the limp dialogue. I could rightly acknowledge my frustration with set-ups designed mostly to work teenage boys into a lather of lust or disgust. And I could note that while the performers work hard to be appealing, there's just not much appealing about the characters. When it comes right down to it, the four teens are just types, representations of everyone who wanted to go to a KISS concert so bad they could taste the flashpot smoke...guys like me, for instance. DETROIT ROCK CITY isn't a good film, but it's a film I couldn't resist. As hard as it is under the best of circumstances to watch a film objectively, it's even harder when you're watching the story of your life.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 KISS-stories: 6.
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