School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003) — Review

School of Rock promised a Coleridgian Xanadu to its Gen Z audience: a mid-aughts utopia of gender equality, body positivity, and the shimmering oasis of a viable career in the creative sector. These prospects may have dimmed in intervening decades, but the sincerity and conviction of Jack Black's mission shine through. 'I'm not a Satanic sex god anymore,' says his roommate, music teacher Ned Schneebly. 'I'm a working stiff, and that's cool.' The unbridled 'stick it to the man' energy of School of Rock reminds us that ‘wannabe corporate sellouts’ are, in fact, not cool, and that now more than ever is time to 'stick it to the man'; a time when the housing bubble reminds us that ‘the legend of the rent is way hardcore.’

Jack Black portrays feral yet prodigious rock goblin Dewey Finn, a rakish down-and-out who variously torments and enraptures a duo of competent, modern professional women. The ideal of authenticity has plagued an illustrious selection of ‘let them eat cake’ movements from Marie Antionette to the post-Soviet Balkans, and seems weirdly applicable here too; these Hollywood-benighted avatars of capitalist fulfilment may not know it, but they’re offering a more convincing model of ‘sticking it to the man’ than we’ll get for another two plus decades.

School of Rock — like any historical musical or political project — succeeds because it originates from a point of wretched misery. ‘You’re not hardcore/unless you live hardcore’, goes Dewey’s motto — a chant taken up with enough sincerity by his entourage of sixth graders to propel them to the end of a Battle of the Bands. ‘You’re not hardcore’ is a proclamation of weakness — a luxury denied to most adults in possession of their rational faculties. A fact which might explain the success of a movie where a chubby thirty-something with messy curtains gets on stage with Joan Cusack and a class of prepubescent worryworts to save the day, and the New York housing market.

The sad reality is that almost 20 years on, almost all of us find ourselves cast as a Ned Schneebly rather than a Dewey Finn. Ned — played by Mike White, a successful actor and writer overshadowed somewhat by the successes of Jack Black and Tenacious D — represents a compromise with the establishment. School of Rock offers a certain level of ironic sociological enquiry, twenty years after its honest, sloppy promise of a truly multicultural education system — and more importantly, of an America where everyone could just ‘be themselves’ to get by.

Truthfully, most of the School of Rock generation floundered under the creative yoke. Miranda Cosgrove, who played teacher’s pet Summer, was in fact the only one of the bunch to swim, successfully, with the sharks; best known for her role in iCarly, which she’s currently reprising in a nostalgia reboot on Paramount Plus, the late twenty-something was one of few child stars equipped to handle the ‘rock and roll’ lifestyle into which the film threw its pint sized protagonists.

Jack Black had already been thoroughly desexualised by a visible midriff; unjust, perhaps, but at least relegating him to a category latterly occupied by bankable stars like Melissa McCarthy and Amy Schumer.

But the children of the band — the kids who, ironically, a washed-up adult uses to reinvigorate his popular status — didn’t all prove so adaptable. No one but Cosgrove has another IMDb credit; the band’s bassist went so far as to blame her eating disorder, drug addiction, and alcoholism on the early spotlight. None of this is to blame Black, though. The cast have all proclaimed his support and enthusiasm for their subsequent projects. It’s just the ‘Britney effect’, in their own words — the weird combination of mass-cultural and fetishistic creepiness that ruined the tween years of stars from the Disney Channel to Leon: The Professional at the start of the millennium.

School of Rock reflected a number of 2000s middle-class anxieties, particularly around conformity, academic pressure, extracurricular activities, body image, race and sexuality in private school. But equally, Dewey Finn’s reversion to AC/DC-ish schoolboy shorts and cap presents a solution to those tensions: a rediscovery of the ghastly, obnoxious, boyish joy of rock and roll. As the broke, unemployed, yet well-intentioned ersatz teacher says: ‘I don't wanna hang out with wannabe corporate sellouts. I'm gonna form my own band. We're gonna start a revolution. And you're gonna be a funny little footnote on my epic ass!’