Funny, happy, and fairly clean too!

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2008)

Robert "Fish" Fishman is the drummer for heavy metal band Vesuvius. They are offered a lucrative record deal, but only on condition that they dump Fish and replace him with the record label head's nephew. Pete Best cameos, to make sure that we don't miss the point. 20 years later, Vesuvius has gone from strength to strength while Fish has drifted through a series of dead end jobs, filled with bitterness, and ending up sleeping on an inflatable mattress in his sister's loft. Then his nephew Matt, keyboard player in high school band ADD, asks him to substitute for their drummer, so he gets behind a kit for the first time in 20 years. Various mishaps lead to the band having to rehearse over an internet link. Fish, by this time, is reduced to living in an overheated basement, and the resulting video of the nude drummer becomes immensely popular on Youtube, leading to a record contract and tour, which culminates when ADD is invited to open at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the occasion of Vesuvius' induction.
The joke here is that the young band members are all vastly more adult than Fish, who remains resolutely adolescent in his approach to everything.
I liked this film a lot. It would have been easy for it to have embraced the current tendency for humour to lean towards smut, scatology, drugs and bad language: it is greatly to the movie's credit that it remains pretty much (though not totally) smut-free, devoid of bad language, yet still very funny. Rainn Wilson, as Fish, deserves kudos here for delivering a performance which embraces childish idiocy, slapstick, heart and sentiment, all wrapped up in a genuine likability.
Having said that, none of the characters here are fundamentally unpleasant - the worst they (the Vesuvius members and record company people) can be accused of is shallowness and disloyalty. The young band members are fleshed out beyond ciphers and all play well, and Christina Applegate as the mother of one of the members (and looking as good as she's ever looked) teaches Fish the valuable lesson that you can embrace adult responsibility without ever letting go of your inner rocker. Even the secondary characters (Fish's rock-star wannabe brother-in-law) have their moments.
This movie isn't a great work of art, but it is a solid, entertaining, and fairly heart-warming comedy.