‘We Are Your Friends’ is an underrated example of millennial persistence
When Ferris Bueller recommended looking around at life so as not to miss it, it didn’t occur to him that every day might not be full of quality and opportunity. Whether the iconic line represents an idealistic teenage platitude or a privileged relic of mid-’80s prosperity, no one can deny that, nearly 30 years later, it would be naive to present young people’s future outlook with the same sparkle.
“We Are Your Friends,” the regrettably titled 2015 drama unjustly dismissed as an EDM-focused “Entourage” knockoff, presents being young as a perpetual and difficult effort to separate possible from impossible, real from simulated. The centerpiece sequence features ambitious DJ Cole (Zac Efron) and Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski) blissfully running around the Las Vegas version of Paris following an outdoor music festival and, the morning after an incomparable night of dancing and forbidden physicality, playing house as they eat room service in robes and pretend that they are an affluent couple with a future. They know that this is not real; Sophie is the girlfriend/assistant to James (Wes Bentley), a past-his-prime DJ who has taken on Cole as an unofficial protege. She relies on James for, among other things, employment and the house they share, and feels she can’t afford to go back to school. But for one night, Cole and Sophie force external concerns away and escape to a fantasy together.
Read Matt’s interview with Zac Efron, Emily Ratajkowski and Max Joseph
It’s worth mentioning that, about two years later in the same city at another music festival, a shooting killed 60 people and wounded nearly 900. “WAYF” is not about violence in America, but it is about millennials’ feeling of instability (the underappreciated 2020 title “Spontaneous,” in which high school seniors combust at random, would make for an interesting double feature) and how a lack of faith in the future changes the short-term. “It’s not about making it last longer,” James, who has performed from Ibiza to Tokyo but can’t function happily for more than one day in a row, advises Cole about why he shouldn’t mix tobacco and THC. “It’s about enjoying it.”
James has already made it, though; Cole chose not to run track at UC-Davis or go to college at all. He and his entertainment-industry-aspiring friends (Jonny Weston, Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Shaffer) have few prospects that feel tangible, and financial need and morality may not be able to co-exist. (That they fall into a phony real estate scheme based on disingenuous sales calls shows they should’ve taken a night off from the club to see “The Wolf of Wall Street.”) Like a “Social Network” outtake they reference the inventor of Instagram turning one idea into security at 26. Cole believes a DJ’s “ticket to everything” is “a laptop, some talent and one track.” Success is just one idea, one song, one app invention away, but is that one thing really attainable? Especially in an unjust world where the wealthy jerks who slut-shame Sophie are more likely to land in powerful positions than suffer consequences?
Throughout, co-writer Max Joseph, a co-star from MTV’s “Catfish” making his impressive feature directorial debut, creates a visual signature of temporary intoxication, with animated flourishes and onscreen text serving as augmented reality that gives way to the truth underneath. Meanwhile, unlike so many movies about creative pursuits, “WAYF” actually captures the process and origin of the art itself, and not in some corny “Across the Universe” manner. Joseph opens with Cole simply working in his room, building a track, and later includes an exhilarating explanation of how to work a crowd that not only educates viewers about different musical styles’ beats-per-minute principles (reggae is 60; house is 110-130; hardocre is 195) but suggests that for DJs, pacing a party is the pursuit of a sturdy trajectory, control for people who often have little. This is a movie about the impact of learning on movement and vice-versa, as an intelligent performer gets attendees out of their heads and into something more intimate, connected and biological.
In “WAYF,” which sits at only 39% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and fared arguably worse at the box office, a central, thoughtful tension exists between mind and body that should not be shrugged off. It would be a stretch to say that the film is a cross between “Spring Breakers” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.” But it’s a compliment to call this underrated, well-acted exploration of personal, professional and musical identity a more populist cousin of those far more celebrated, auteurist visions.
The great soundtrack asks questions like “Is it desire, or is it love that I’m feeling for you?” and “You ain’t getting any younger, are you?” And Cole bellows his own question to a supportive crowd as he performs a show that might change his life, or maybe it won’t: “Are we ever going to be better than this?” Everyone present, on stage and in the crowd, knows that their joy might not last longer than the event. And that the world they will return to -- particularly in the U.S., which in August 2015 faced mass shootings and soaring student debt and questionable career trajectories for graduates and was still some 17 months before you know who was inaugurated -- contains little that resembles the former comforts and possibilities of youth. “What are you, 23?” James, who has more than a decade on Cole, asks the developing DJ at one point. “You haven’t even been alive long enough to understand the meaning of the word ‘irreparable.’” The veteran artist apparently isn’t old enough, or maybe he’s too old, to realize that he’s wrong.
Recently many have praised “Soul,” another music-based movie, which attempts to question and inspire but says nothing coherent beyond “Appreciate the little things.” “WAYF” also values the sounds and textures of the natural world but better understands the personal experience that drives artistic creation. It’s a timely exploration of passion’s collision with financial and emotional needs that doesn’t promise everything is going to be OK, but assures that fighting uncertainty with action is the closest thing there is to hope.
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