School of Rock

Strangely enough, nearly half a century ago, it was a movie to that finally drug popular culture into rock music. By including the now-classic-but-then-little-known rock & roll number "Rock Around The Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets on its soundtrack, the 1955 juvenile delinquency drama ‘The Blackboard Jungle’ first expressed the popular potential of rock music. The film’s success rocketed the song to a eight week stint atop the charts, made the song one of the best selling singles of all time, and began the rock & roll era as we know it. Since then, the destinies of rock and movies have been intertwined. Now, from somewhere in that tradition, here’s ‘School of Rock.’

Failed rocker Dewey Finn (Jack Black) has been kicked out of his third-rate bar band because of creative differences. Unable to come up with his share of the rent (surprise!) and desperate for cash, Dewey impersonates his substitute teacher roommate, landing a job teaching a class of nerdy prep school fifth-graders. Traditional academic subjects are not Dewey’s forte, but when he hears the kids practicing classical nuggets with the school orchestra Dewey finds his connection with the kids—music. He’ll initiate them into the secret world of rock music, unite them as a band, teach them to rock out, enter them in the local Battle of the Bands, then use the cash prize for rent money.

‘School of Rock’ is a bit of a surprise, a mainstream, kid-friendly movie from two successful independent filmmakers—screenwriter Mike White (“Chuck and Buck,” “The Good Girl,” “Orange County") and director Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused,” “Before Sunrise,” “Waking Life”)—but it’s the perfect vehicle for Jack Black. Dewey finally gives Black the character he’s being perfecting since 1999’s ‘Jesus’ Son,’ and Dewey’s on-stage/substitute teacher persona is a more sophisticated, three-dimensional version of Black’s Tenacious D shtick.

Black does a dead-on Angus Young, which may indeed be worth the ticket price on its own, and there are more genuinely funny moments in the film than you can absorbing in a single viewing, but the film’s transcendent moment comes when Tomika (Maryam Hassan), one of the group’s back-up singers, confides in Dewey that she wants to sing lead, then does an astounding, otherworldly “Chain of Fools” that, as much as anything else in the film, or as anything else I’ve heard or seen this year, for that matter, proves the truth by which Dewey Finn lives—that music can change the world.

Matt Parks (January 11, 2004)