It's hard to escape the potent magic of pop music. Some consumers never do, hovering forever in thrall to three-minute sermons of neurotic idiocy blasting from the commercially conjoined pulpits of R&B, rock, and country. (To keep this point sharp, let's credit "alternative" music with expanding the illusion of choice, then let's just set that ingeniously marketed kettle aside: too many worms.) In transmutations both alienating and horrifying, advanced pop fans occasionally evolve into stultifying snobs. For instance, back when it seemed to matter, I had a friend who would have kissed Bruce Springsteen's theatrically thrashed boots (and known their exact size) before condescending to enjoy David Byrne's solo work, since he deemed Springsteen's hangdog mythos "real" and Byrne's loopy anthropology "unrelatable." Akin to the dysfunctional discophiles of Stephen Frears' wildly amusing High Fidelity, that friend and his peckish pop diet illustrated an unhappy paradigm: The more persnickety and self-righteous the musical tastes become, the more the conquests and relationships dissolve into cheap melodrama and tragic self-delusion ... elements that are, of course, the very lifeblood of pop music. Q.E.D. As John Cusack morosely ponders in the film's opening moments: "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?" Reel around the fountain and spin the black circle, indeed.
Melissa Mosely
Born to Play This Role: John Cusack (with Iben Hjejle) in High Fidelity.
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Opens Friday at the Sony Metreon, the AMC 1000 Van Ness, and the UA Colma
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Cusack plays Rob Gordon, the not particularly proud owner of a groovy, largely untrafficked Chicago record shop called Championship Vinyl. As funny as he is forlorn, Rob haunts his treasure vault with his two indispensable if near-intolerable friends, the nervous, fanatical Dick (Todd Louiso, brittle and wry), and the profoundly obnoxious Barry (Jack Black, mouth almighty of Tenacious D). In one of his countless asides to the camera, Rob explains that he hired his fellow thirtysomethings on a part-time basis, but they've insisted upon showing up every day, for the past four years. The reason? These guys adore their work. They while away the hours concocting Top Five lists of songs, records, and entertainments for every imaginable occasion, battling each other with encyclopedic reservoirs of music trivia and otherwise avoiding -- in keeping with a young man's wont -- anything to do with the responsibilities of mortal life on this planet, all with the smug assurance of dealers harboring the finest stash in town. Barry gleefully banishes a hopeful middle-aged man for requesting a copy of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" ("Do you even know your daughter? There's no way she likes that song!"), and Dick ecstatically plies a Green Day fan with an import LP of Stiff Little Fingers. Rob calls them the Musical Moron Twins, but the boffins are also his closest friends, and they keep his floundering business alive, if only vaguely.
Rob's love life is another story, a nearly terminal nadir. His main squeeze, Laura (Iben Hjejle, Danish for "Arquette"), has recently outgrown her adolescent existence, and the ambitious young lawyer leaves Rob for a former neighbor, a ponytailed, New Age aura-balancer named Ian (Tim Robbins, Bodhi trash). This development wrecks Rob's mother (Margaret Travolta), who in turn hammers her son for repeating his rhythmic pattern of domestic failure. Thus, Rob, who never meant to cause Laura any sorrow, explores the ghosts of failed relationships, a special Top Five list of women who eviscerated him, minus Laura, who doesn't initially make the cut. "If you really wanted to mess me up," he bellows at her departing Saab, "you should have got to me earlier!"
Rather than living like a refugee, Rob decides to scan through his heartbreakers, leading us through flashbacks of adolescence, his failed attempt at college, and young adulthood. The first relationship of young Rob (Drake Bell) with playground sweetheart Alison (Shannon Stillo) lasts a total of six hours, ending one day when the girl decides to try kissing a different boy. But the anguish resonates to the present day. As the elder Rob tells us, "It'd be nice to think that, since I was 14, times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, instincts more developed. But there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one."
The accuracy of that appraisal is left for us to judge, as Rob's awkward and unpleasant flashbacks continue, prompting him to seek out his former flames, to ask them The Awful Question That Cannot Be Answered: "Why?" Wholesome beauty Penny (Joelle Carter) maintained Carly Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Elton John on her Top Five list of favorite artists and now works as a film critic (a questionable correlation, although Rob rightly defines her profession as "unspeakably cool"). Shallow beauty Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) used him as cosmetic grist for her mill and now, a few men later, feels love is "too much hard work." With bitter pill Sarah (Lili Taylor) it made sense "to pool collective loathing for the opposite sex ... and share a bed, too," but, with her, Rob discovers he's a man out of time and she's just pills and soap. Besides, Romeo is restless for a vivacious siren named Marie De Salle (Lisa Bonet, tarted up like Lenny Kravitz but inducing no vomiting), who shamelessly croons Frampton and claims wanton coupling as her inalienable right.
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