Just as “School of Rock,” Richard Linklater’s
newest flick gets off its feet and into its bubbly crowd-surf,
Dewey Finn (Jack Black) intercepts a call from a top-tier private
school that wants to offer his roommate a substitute teaching
stint. The deadbeat 30-something rock lover, desperate to pay his
rent, poses as his pushover comrade and asks “How long does
the gig last?”
Shaken by the employer’s incomprehension, he rephrases the
question: “How long does the job last?” But he delivers
the line with such contemptuous, can’t-be-bothered
insouciance that it’s amusing, and even harder from that
point to believe that Black will ever have a more perfect role.
A sweet-hearted film with a quirky edge, “School of
Rock” delivers just what you’d expect from the premise
without reaching beyond the limits of the script. Black’s
tour-van driving, Zeppelin-adoring character, who claims early on,
“I serve society by rocking,” wants little more than to
solo on stage and win his local town’s Battle of the Bands.
After being voted out of his band, he finds his support from his
private school students, who all seem to possess the talents to put
on an incendiary show.
Though some of the kids are too predictably cast ““ the
effeminate costume designer, the hesitant lead guitarist, the
bratty, punk-rock drummer ““ it’s Black’s
gleefully anarchic screen (or stage?) presence that fuels the
film’s freewheeling energy.
And in spite of his occasional detours into moralizing,
schoolmasterish pedantry (all in the name of rock, of course),
he’s always just the biggest kid in the classroom and never
the domineering star. That role is saved for his underage
bandmates, who all have an apprentice-like veneer that veils their
remarkable musical chops and inherent rock ‘n’ roll
attitude. Such a cast of characters serves as the perfect foil for
the overbearing, yet musically wanting, Black, and that’s why
the movie works.
– Andrew Lee