We Are Your Friends

They say music is life. ​“They”, of course, are hen­na tat­too-sport­ing, wind chime-hoard­ing, trust­fund-reap­ing dude bros wear­ing design­er vests and who use par­ty­ing as an exis­ten­tial com­fort blan­ket – a way to not have to engage with a world that’s going to shit right in front of them. In We Are Your Friends, the snap­py, clap­py debut fea­ture from Max Joseph, life also ends up being music, as Zac Efron’s wannabe, pup­py-eyed house DJ Cole plays a storm­ing set only when he’s able to chan­nel his man­i­fold earth­ly woes into one bang­ing sig­na­ture single.

Where Mia Hansen-Løve’s infi­nite­ly supe­ri­or Eden co-opt­ed the world of EDM as a way to make a lilt­ing state­ment on the inex­orable wax­ing and wan­ing of fash­ions and time pass­ing, this plays things with an alto­geth­er straighter bat, serv­ing up colour sat­u­rat­ed can-do bro­mides and assur­ing view­ers that, while the road may be lit­tered with mis­ery, every­thing will be okay in the end.

The film cen­tres on a quar­tet of super friends who all hang-out togeth­er in the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley and, in the heady throes of het­ero­sex­u­al cama­raderie, have teth­ered their dreams of fame, for­tune and foun­tains of cash to one anoth­er, despite the fact that the audi­ence can clear­ly see that they’re all very dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Mason (Jon­ny West­on), for exam­ple, is a bald­ing, trash-talk­ing mani­ac with anger man­age­ment issues, while Ollie (Shiloh Fer­nan­dez) just likes to remain chill, sells drugs at fes­ti­vals and thinks noth­ing of cash­ing in on the mis­ery of others.

Sen­si­tive Zac, on the oth­er hand, is the soft­ly-spo­ken music mae­stro who starts to hang out with city-hop­ping spin­ner James Reed (Wes Bent­ley), a fes­ti­val head­lin­er who has the car, the house and the woman (Emi­ly Rata­jkows­ki), but has lost the soul. There’s a nifty ear­ly sequence where Cole is being test­ed by James, hired to play some choons at his pool par­ty, and through an illus­trat­ed voice over, Cole shares the secrets of being a DJ (some­thing to do with match­ing BPMs with the human heart­beat, appar­ent­ly). In doing this, he also reveals the genet­ic make-up of house music, sug­gest­ing that it’s just a case of push­ing the right but­tons at the right time.

Direc­tor Joseph has clear­ly tak­en a leaf out of this book, as We Are Your Friends is breezi­ly pre­dictable to the point where you feel he’s stopped even try­ing to make things inter­est­ing. It’s not a right-off by any means, with Efron him­self car­ry­ing the film on his rip­pling shoul­ders. And the dia­logue itself is well writ­ten, par­tic­u­lar­ly the salty back-and-forths between Cole and Reed. Yet, there’s no sat­is­fy­ing dra­mat­ic sweep there, a defi­cien­cy not helped by the fact that women in this world are depict­ed as hot chat­tel for their suc­cess­ful male counterparts.