Leto

The pro­duc­tion of art becomes a polit­i­cal act when oppres­sion rains down from above. It’s some­thing that Russ­ian film­mak­er Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov knows all too well. As a vocal crit­ic of Vladimir Putin, he was arrest­ed on the final week of shoot­ing Leto on charges of fraud and had to com­plete post-pro­duc­tion while under house arrest.

Gov­ern­ment regimes that sup­press inde­pen­dent voic­es are also the sub­ject of this free­wheel­ing slice of musi­cal his­to­ry, though pol­i­tics are sec­ondary to mul­lets, leather jack­ets and a deep love of rock ​’n’ roll.

The Leningrad under­ground scene is the focus of this film about the friend­ship between its twin pio­neers: Mike Nau­menko (Roman Bilyk) of Zoopark; and Vik­tor Tsoi (Teo Yoo) of Kino. There’s less of a sto­ry to Leto than there is an evo­ca­tion of an era: lazy days spent singing, drink­ing and par­ty­ing in between gigs. Mike and Vik­tor mod­el them­selves after their country’s ​‘ide­o­log­i­cal ene­my’, ignor­ing the abuse hurled their way as they do so.

The words of T.Rex and Lou Reed are treat­ed as gospel; hasti­ly scrawled jour­nals of tran­scribed lyrics become holy scrip­tures. Their part­ner­ship refresh­ing­ly lacks con­flict, and so the inter­nal strug­gle comes from cul­ti­vat­ing a musi­cal iden­ti­ty that is more than just the sum of their influences.

Despite its feath­erlight tone, the film pul­sates with an infec­tious ener­gy pro­vid­ed by a series of sequences where char­ac­ters break out into songs such as ​‘Psy­cho Killer’ by ​“Heads That Talk” and Iggy Pop’s ​‘The Pas­sen­ger’. Sere­bren­nikov visu­alis­es music as an ephemer­al escape before a nar­ra­tor known as Skep­tic (Alek­san­dr Kuznetsov) reminds the view­er that ​“this did not happen.”

The weight of the Sovi­et Union is pal­pa­ble from the periph­ery, but the film doesn’t buy into any false notions that the bands are rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies – they mere­ly play the sys­tem as best they can. The life of a rock star is about drown­ing in excess, but in ​’80s Rus­sia, it’s a lux­u­ry to sim­ply be allowed to exist.