Brace your cochleae and get those fists airborne, because We Are Your Friends comes thumping into theaters this weekend. Set in and around the pungent, drug-addled dance clubs of the San Fernando Valley, California, the film is about a young DJ, played by Zac Efron, who dreams of making it big. He’s continually held back by his troglodytic, club-promoter friends, cocky hedonists with testosterone to spare as well as dreams of their own but no plans to make them happen. Despite the difference in milieu, the film has a lot in common with Good Will Hunting and similar coming-of-age dramas; Efron’s protagonist is no prodigy, but he follows a familiar arc, starting out as an affable young slacker, then learning some important lessons from a wise mentor, and finally ending up as a focused adult. Without the specificity of the music and party scene depicted in the film, nothing would set it apart from the pack.
Efron’s character, Cole Carter, looks up to the somewhat older, vastly more successful James Reed (Wes Bentley), though Cole allows that his role model isn’t what he used to be. In his view, James has lost legitimacy, making it big by simply giving audiences what they want. He becomes a mentor to Cole by advising him on his craft and allowing him a glimpse of the high life. James’s girlfriend, Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski), predictably drives a wedge between the new friends after she and Cole share a night of passion, after which Cole has to try to make his own way in the world. None of the main story beats feel anything other than rote. The coupling of Cole and Sophie, Cole’s estrangement from his loser friends and his morally correct decision at a crucial juncture are all so neatly plotted out that they lose all impact.
The film’s best sequences harness the infectious intensity of electronic dance music, as when Cole gradually coaxes a group of laid-back partygoers into movement by modulating tempo and paying close attention to the crowd. In these moments, director Max Joseph (of dubious “Catfish” fame) sheds light on the art of the DJ in a way that almost justifies that turn of phrase. But too frequently he relies on flashy onscreen text and hackneyed editing tricks to match the volume of the soundtrack. Particularly egregious is an ugly animated sequence with some very cheap-looking rotoscope effects that’s meant to convey the effects of PCP.
Perhaps we can forgive the film’s reverence for a transitory subculture, but only up to a point. One bit that’s hard to take seriously is the idea that James Reed was once an artist with integrity, as opposed to the burned out hack we see now. It’s hard to imagine what his stuff could have sounded like previously. Club music is necessarily limited by certain parameters—including, of course, danceability—so the dichotomy between self-expression and pandering feels false. A tour of Reed’s lavish studio reveals a vast array of instruments, including a Wurlitzer electric piano, but was his music ever actually flexible enough to accommodate the rare Buchla synthesizer he owns? It would be one thing if Reed was portrayed as a dilettante, but the idea that the beautifully cerebral Buchla is just another tool of the DJ’s trade is laughable.
With a better story, We Are Your Friends could have been salvageable, but the tired tropes and naive self-seriousness make it mostly a chore to sit through.