Not quite music to the ears

We Are Your Friends, a coming-of-age film about an aspiring DJ, lacks zing

For those of you who were fortunate enough to watch Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden, a delightful 2014 French film that chronicles the rise and fall of a disk jockey (DJ) who pioneered the French music scene in the early 1990s, We Are Your Friends is likely to come across as a distant, pretentious cousin. Films on electronic dance music (EDM) are rarely made and it's fair to say that the makers of We Are Your Friends must be wondering why they ever chose to make this one.

Cole Carter (Zac Efron) and his bunch of friends live in San Fernando Valley, a relatively impoverished suburb complete with parched lawns and empty swimming pools on the other side of the splashy Hollywood hills. Efron plays a 20-something, aspiring DJ, who wants to take the spinning world by storm and make fans waltz to his music at Tomorrowland. His friends (Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Shaffer and Jonny Weston), meanwhile, are a group of clueless, weed-smoking buffoons who help set up gigs for Carter - earning a few quick bucks in the process. The quartet later takes up jobs as brokers at a real estate firm.

Carter gets his big Hollywood ticket when he accidentally encounters James Reed (Wes Bentley), a past-his-prime DJ who could spin a song or two in his time, in a car park. Now, Reed spends his time guzzling inordinate amounts of extravagant whiskey at his California home. The probability of debutant director Max Joseph watching Aditya Roy Kapur in Aashiqui 2 before filming this one, however, remains low. Reed immediately develops a close bond with Carter, letting the precocious youngster (in Reed's own words) into his home and allowing him to use his own equipment. Carter takes the bonding a tad too seriously, falling for Reed's beautiful girlfriend-cum-assistant, Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski), along the way.

We Are Your Friends has a cliched storyline and a screenplay that is painfully trite. Carter's journey from a middling musician plying his trade in shady nightclubs to a superstar DJ making delirious fans groove to his beats at sprawling venues is far too simplistic, with barely any obstacles. The film rambles incessantly without making any headway in the first half, before hastily reaching a predictable conclusion in the latter part. For a film based on EDM, the soundtracks are surprisingly weak and would seldom make you jump out of your chair.

Joseph (who also directed the mushy and pointless MTV reality show, Catfish) though does provide glimpses of enchanting cinema in some scenes. Joseph's creation of an animated world around a woozy Carter at an art gallery, where colours flow almost majestically from all directions, is a visual delight. Carter's penchant for long runs in the afternoon sun, during which he gets his inspiration for new sounds, has been shot beautifully and is bound to get your adrenaline pumping.

For the performances, it's finally refreshing to see Efron break away from the High School Musical and 17 Again mould, but his character in this one is bland and the acting tedious. His character lacks the spark and pep that would have made the film more watchable. Bentley's portrayal of a perennially-sloshed mentor to Efron is slick, even though his role gets boring after a while. As for the others, Joseph could have actually done without them. They add little to a plot that gets irritably maudlin towards the end.

With little attention to detail, We Are Your Friends is a forlorn attempt at bringing to life a coming-of-age story. In the end, there is little that works for this brashly-directed film. Efron tries to make it click in the beginning, and then Bentley and Ratajkowski try to save it in the end. Unfortunately, all of them abjectly fail at resuscitating it.