Here is a fatuous film about DJ-ing and clubbing in Los Angeles, whose tired music-video cliches and Entourage-style bro-love would be wearisome at the best of times. But coming so soon after Mia Hansen-Løve’s genuinely passionate movie Eden, on the same subject, it really is dispiriting.
Zac Efron plays Cole, a super-hot young DJ with headphones always nestling around his neck, and three loyal and pulchritudinous buddies who organise party nights. Yearning for creativity and expression, Cole comes under the spell of the established but cynical older star DJ James, played by Wes Bentley – and he falls in love with James’s unhappy, beautiful girlfriend Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski). Can Cole somehow reconcile the synthesised style of his beloved electronic music with his burgeoning desire for real-world credibility: real sounds, real emotions?
The finale in which we supposedly reach the solution to this deeply uninteresting aesthetic crisis is so phoney, so facile and so cortex-clobberingly stupid that it will inspire audiences everywhere to reach into the screen, pull the plug on sensitive Zac’s speakers and pour his Pellegrino over his head.
