When I first heard about We Are Your Friends, a movie about electronic dance music (EDM) starring Zac Efron, I didn’t think my eye sockets were big enough to give this movie the roll it deserved. It even features a bro who hates being called “bro”; now that is brotastic. But behind Efron trying to find the track that’ll change the world, We Are Your Friends is an insightful coming-of-age story for millennials.
Efron plays Cole, an aspiring 23-year-old DJ who spends most of his time on his laptop searching for that one track or trying to hustle a buck with his friends. At one of his gigs he meets a popular, albeit self-destructive DJ named James (Wes Bentley) who takes Cole under his wing. Things get complicated when Cole starts falling for James’s assistant/girlfriend, Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski). Which begs the question: whatever will Cole do?
We have seen this story done a thousand times before. The difference here is director Max Joseph. The opening thirty minutes feature incredibly stylized scenes, which might be stupid anywhere else, but in this movie, and with our leading man on all kinds of drugs, it looks pretty cool.
Joseph also gets outstanding performances from his actors. In lesser hands, Efron’s three friends Mason, Ollie, and Squirrel (Jonny Weston, Shiloh Fernandez, and Alex Shaffer respectively) would have been one-dimensional characters not worth caring about. But he takes all three characters and gives them each unique perspective which adds to Cole’s progression as a character. Though he doesn’t give his leading lady much to do beyond dance and look pretty, he establishes Efron as a solid leading man. And while it isn’t that much of a stretch for Efron to play a pretty boy, his performance had me rooting for his character to succeed despite coming off like a giant douche.
But the best performance goes to Wes Bently, who walks a fine line between enlightened guru and strung-out drunk in the best way possible. Any time you want to roll your eyes at the movie he is already there, mocking his counterparts for their “millennial angst [and] struggles with constant validation.” He has all the best lines and the wisdom that comes with years of success, but there is a darkness to him that always leaves him at the bottom of a bottle. You simultaneously want to be him and are scared to become him, and that is tricky performance to pull off.
There are a lot of aspects to this movie that remain unoriginal; the third act is downright telegraphed. But even though I knew what was going to happen I kept watching because I had become invested in the characters, and that is the mark of a good story.
For the movie to succeed the music had to be good, which was potentially a tough sell for me because EDM isn’t my jam. But the soundtrack for the movie is strong. It’s a credit to the production team that realized how important the music would be to this story, and found songs that enhanced what was happening on screen.
I’m sure fans and haters of EDM alike are going to dislike We Are Your Friends. Then again, I considered myself a person who hates EDM, and I still enjoyed this movie. At the end of the day the music is just a backdrop to a story about one person trying to do what he loves—how can you not root for that? B-
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