Music is the window to the soul

Rating: 9/10 (5 December 2004)

Down on his luck and smashed on booze rock guitarist Dewey Finn, Jack Black, is behind on his rent in the apartment that he shares with his friend and former rock musician and now substitute teacher Ned Schneebly, Mike White, and his, Ned's, girlfriend Patty Di Marco, Sarah Silverman. At the studio where his rock band is rehearsing for the big nation-wide "Battle of the Bands" competition Dewey is told that he's been voted off the band and replaced, in short he's been canned. With the whole world collapsing around him Dewey gets a phone call at home that changes his, and those who he later comes in contact with, world forever.
Wanting to talk to his room-mate Ned who's away Horace Green Elementary School Principle Rosalie Mullins, Joan Cusack,tells Dewy that one of the teacher at the school just got hurt and that Ned was highly recommended to teach in this very prestigious prep elementary school.
Dewey pretending to be Ned says he'll be over to teach as soon as possible feeling that he'll make the money he needs for the rent working there and no one will know the difference if he's a teacher or not. Dewey as well as the students that he was to teach at first didn't know it but that he as well as they were in for the surprise of their lives.
Rip roaring movie much like the old Judy Garland Mickey Rooney musicals of the 1940's about a group of kids who never really had any good and constructive fun in their lives due to their strict upbringing by their stuffed up parents and teachers letting their hair down and their singing voices and musical instruments up. In the end the students making it to the "battle of the Band" competition contest and at the same time feeling a lot better about themselves and those around them by doing that; all because of that nobody who was really somebody, but at the time didn't know it, Dewey Finn.
Jack Black gives a solid as well as touching performance as Dewey Finn the washed up musician who through teaching music gave him a new lease on life as well as the young students that he was teaching. What worked so well in the movie was that the music that the students were playing was a composition of all their efforts put together to make it into a beautiful harmony. Where everyone pitches in together like a well synchronized symphony orchestra to make it all work. Also very moving in the movie "School of Rock" was the Horace Green Elementary School's Principle Rosalie Mullins played by Joan Cusack. Tight and stuck up and with no sense of humor we see her after having a mug of beer with Dewey at a local bar open up and tell him the pressures that she's under from the school staff and the students parents. As it just burns her to keep all that tension in and not allowing any of her real feelings to come out.
In the end the music that Dewey and his students practiced and later played at the "Battle of the Bands" competition not only let her come out of her shell but the students parents as well. Dewys music brought the best out of their kids by teaching them to be together as a team in success as well as in failure instead of trying to one up each other at the expense of those who didn't make it.
Like the saying by the great American Writer/Composer Aaron Copland says about music: That after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.