With its Bret Easton Ellis-lite misanthropy and knowing pre-X Factor “let the audience decide” jokes, this 90s-set music industry romp should probably have been entitled English Syco: the Britpop Years. Nicholas Hoult is obnoxiously talentless A&R man Steven Stelfox (think Patrick Bateman minus the killer charm) in screenwriter John Niven’s adaptation of his own 2008 novel, itself inspired by his stint as a talent scout who turned down Coldplay and Muse. Hoult is a sharp performer but understandably struggles to find dark humour in cringe-worthy shock jock lines such as: “This music is the biggest insult to humanity since a roomful of Nazis first cooed over the blueprints for Auschwitz.”
Lacking, too, is the visual wit that made Mary Harron’s American Psycho adaptation so scabrously entertaining, leaving us instead with little more than the depressing sight of a hairy James Corden snorting copious amounts of coke before taking an unmourned early bath.
