We Are Your Friends and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros. Pictures
Directed by Max Joseph
How many music movies are we going to get this month!? Straight Outta Compton is still dominating the box office, Rikki and the Flash came out just before that, and now we have this movie about Electronica artist? Well while those movies were banking at least somewhat on nostalgia and music from decades ago that everyone’s familiar with, this one’s trying to be a bit more modern with a genre that while being around since at least the eighties, hasn’t become prominent in the mainstream until the last five or six years. Not only that, but the movie also has a fairly significant draw in Zac Efron who’s been really trying to stretch himself creatively in the last couple of years in order to distance himself from his Disney super star days, and has actually been succeeding for the most part. Are we getting another classic rise to stardom story with a fresh coat of paint, or is this going to be an unbearable slog despite it being about a genre of music that’s underrepresented in cinema despite its popularity in the pop world? Let’s find out!!
The movie is about Cole (Zac Efron) who’s a struggling Electronica artist in the San Fernando Valley. Like most creative types, he spends half his time working on his trade and the other half not doing much else, but he clearly has a passion for what he does and has aspirations to be one of the best. His three friends are Mason, Ollie, and Squirrel (played by Jonny Weston, Shiloh Fernandez, and Alex Shaffer respectively), and they don’t seem to have much going on in their lives either. Much less in fact considering that aside from Shiloh Fernandez (who half-heartedly wants to be an actor), none of them even have much of a dream to be striving towards and are just running out the clock on their twenties. They’re all still young even if the actors are clearly pushing thirty, but they are reaching the point in their lives where they can’t keep goofing around and have to either commit to whatever goals they have or move on to something else. Opportunity comes a knocking for Cole as he finds himself chatting up another electronica artist called James (Wes Bently) who has indeed made it in the industry and the two of them become friends in a sort of mentor mentee relationship. As with all music stories though, there has to be something to strain the friendship and in this case it’s James’s assistant Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski) who Cole starts crushing on immediately despite her relationship with James outside of her role as his employee. Will Cole be able to handle the modicum of success that slowly starts to take form now that he knows someone in the industry who’s willing to give him a chance? Will everything fall apart because he’s a dumb ass twenty-something that refuses to find ANY other person to fall in love with? Will his friends… do other stuff?
“So do we get our own stories?” “Hey, whoa! Which of us was in High School Musical?” “You’re right Mr. Efron. I’m sorry for getting out of line…”
