One Good Film: "We Are The Best!" (2013)
Three 13-year-old girls are the Ramones of middle school.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past, and you do what you want with that information.
We Are The Best! (2013, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Max and Kanopy, for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere) – An adorably ragged Swedish comedy about three disaffected middle school girls who start a rock group just to piss everybody off. It’s directed by Lukas Moodysson from a script co-written with his wife, Coco Moodysson, who adapted her own autobiographical graphic novel (autobiographic novel?), and it fizzes with the energy of remembered adolescent grievances and the proper bird-flipping response. It has in its two leads, Mira Barkhammer and Mira Grosin (above left and center, with Liv LeMoyne), a duo with the complementary personalities, if not the actual talent, of a certain songwriting team from Liverpool. As I wrote in my Boston Globe review,
Playing Bobo… Barkhammar glares at the world through John Lennon glasses and has recently lopped her hair off into a bushy brown shrub. She looks like a dyspeptic koala, or Leon Trotsky reincarnated as a 13-year-old girl… If Bobo’s the self-conscious Lennon of her self-willed exile, Klara (Grosin) is the McCartney: outgoing and charmingly defiant, with a raffish smile to match the curve of her Mohawk. “We Are the Best!” catches these two best friends in a dare: They sign up for the rehearsal room at the local youth center just to keep the local heavy-metal boy band from practicing. Klara picks up a bass guitar and browbeats Bobo into parking behind the drum kit; they bash around and come up with a chorus about hating organized sports. (“Children cry and scream, but you only care about your soccer team!”) Neither of them has any idea what they’re doing. This, of course, is how the Ramones and the Sex Pistols got started…. [The movie is] slapdash and alive, with a 13-year-old’s under-the-radar improvisations and missteps…. “We Are the Best!” remembers what it feels like to feel everything for the first time.
Moodysson (“Together,” “Lilya 4-Ever”) is a good filmmaker with a great big heart who disappeared off the radar after this movie; he made a 2019 television series, “Gostä,” for Netflix in Sweden and is reportedly finishing up a sequel, “Together 99,” that revisits the commune of “Together” 25 years later. Honestly, I’d love it if he decided to return to Bobo and Klara now that ten years have passed, just to see if the band went anywhere.
(The other unmissable movie in this nano-genre is 2005’s “Linda Linda Linda,” about four high-school girls in Japan who start a rock band. Even more exhilarating than “We Are The Best!,” it’s sadly unavailable for streaming and hard to find on DVD, although there’s a passable bootleg copy on YouTube for the time being.)
I hope you enjoy the movie! Don’t hesitate to weigh in with thoughts.
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