Rock School

Directed by Don Argott

I am no doubt the only one on Earth who remembers the video for Yo La Tengo's song "Sugarcube" - ask me about it when you see me.

How do you mess up a documentary about nine year-old kids learning to sing Ozzy?

Sometime around 1999, Paul Green turned his after school guitar classes into a full fledged (after)school of rock, where some 200 kids aged 9 to 17 come daily to learn “the basics: power chords, head banging, and being a rock star”, as the poster’s tag line reads (I guess the guy brought in to make that sound even vaguely compelling or catchy was out sick that weekend). Turning his lessons into an actual school presumably allowed Green to hire a staff of teachers, which is fortunate since Green himself is rarely seen doing anything other than talking about himself, and screeching and shrilly swearing at his students. What little actual teaching he does appears to be how to mug, vamp, and scowl – basically, everything that’s wrong about music today, or ever has been.

Okay, at the risk of sounding overly touchy-feely, if you really want to mold “significant” musicians, as Green claims to want to do, teach them to find their own voice, to find the thing that makes them unique, to find the thing that gets them excited, and most importantly that it’s okay to just go with it, and to go with it with everything they have. And if that one thing happens to be, say, Quaker rap, why not?

In other words, you can be great without being a “star”.

Okay, abhorrent teaching philosophy aside, Rock School really could have been a great documentary.

So, how do you mess up a documentary about nine year-old kids learning to sing Ozzy?

For one thing, don’t make this story about the kids, but about their shrill and utterly obnoxious teacher. At several points Green even admits that that’s not even really him, but an act he does for the students, and for this documentary itself.

Assholes pretending to be bigger assholes because they think it makes them look better on the big screen. Hello, Michael Moore.

At far too many points to mention I wanted to physically shake director Don Argott and tell him, make this movie about the kids. Let them talk. Watch what happens to them from the day they enroll to their first show, and beyond. Watch how, and what, they develop. Do NOT make the movie about their asshole, cheeseball “teacher” who does nothing but scream and berate and mug for the camera for an hour and a half (noticing a pattern yet?).

Near the end of the film, Will O’Connor, the mopey, shaggy-haired, bespectacled boy of questionable musical talent who serves as sort of a commenting Greek chorus to these proceedings (in a far better movie, Will O’Connor would be the star – he is far and away the most intelligent, insightful, and well-spoken of the few people in this film who actually speak) makes the observation that there is a definite hierarchy at Rock School, with the handful of truly talented kids (and they are truly talented) getting all the attention and love, and the all the other students sort of getting looked over, falling through the cracks, disappearing. Apparently, the makers of Rock School have fallen into the same mind-set. Maybe they did set out to make a movie about the kids, about all of them. Maybe once they started they, like Green, decided to just focus on the “cool” kids.

Indeed, only about a dozen of the 200 students of Rock School are ever even shown doing anything besides filling a room, and of that dozen, only three of them (C.J. Tywoniak, a true guitar prodigy; Madi Diaz-Svalgard, the aforementioned ex-Quaker rapper, shamed by Green into becoming merely an incredible singer; and Will O’Connor) to my recollection speak. Plus two, if you count the two nine year-olds speaking by proxy for their weird stage-mom (and their weird stage-“teacher). Other than Will O’Connor, you get very little sense of who these kids are, why they’re here, and what they’re learning.

No, check that. We get some sense of what they’re learning. Nine year-olds, we can excuse for parroting their parents’ and “teacher’s” wishes to go on tour and get free stuff. It’s when an otherwise fully reasonable and incredibly talented teenager expresses that their main reason for being a musician is to sell a million records that I decide that I guess I really do hate people, all people, forever.

I really tried to like Rock School. Who wouldn’t? And there were a couple moments where I forgot I was in a movie theater, almost stood up and screamed (the good kind) at the end of a performance or an incredible solo. Will O'Connor says at the end of the film (before back-pedaling, a little) that Rock School is bigger than Paul Green, whether Paul Green wants to admit it or not. I wish Argott had listened. See Rock School to watch some amazing (and amazingly talented) kids do some amazing things; don’t see it to get any real sense of who these kids are, or why they’re here.