The oddest thing about this movie was that it was produced and directed by Lou Adler an important manager in the 1960's and 1970's whose most important artists were the Mamas & the Papas and Carole King (just the man for a punk movie!) and that it's a no-holds-barred vision of the rock world as cynically exploitative and manipulative, taking honest expressions of teen angst and turning them into phony commodities. One wonders whatever possessed Adler to make a movie exposing the seamy side of the business that had made him rich enough to produce a major-studio feature film! Aside from that, it's a sometimes dull, sometimes stupid, sometimes incredibly compelling movie held together mostly by the marvelously deadpan performance of Diane Lane in the female lead. Adler's direction doesn't have the excitement we expect from a rock 'n' roll movie but it's serviceable, and Barry Ford's performance as the Black bus driver who's the voice of reason is quite good. Incidentally, it occurred to me that the story might have been inspired by the real-life band the Shaggs, three no-talent teenage sisters who recorded an album called "Philosophy of the World" in 1969, funded by their father and released privately. They developed an Ed Wood-style so-bad-it's-good following and copies of their album went for four-figure sums until it was recently released on CD.
