We Saw the Zac Efron EDM Movie, and It Wasn’t Terrible
Zac Efron and his steely gaze, as Cole Carter
Like EDM itself, We Are Your Friends—the big-budget Zac Efron movie about electronic dance music—has been highly divisive. A lot of people in the electronic music industry seem gleefully prepared to hate it (see hateful tweets below), while box office analysts predict it blowing up like a new Armin track or the power of the millions of millennials whose love of dance music and culture will drive them to theaters in the same way it drives them to festivals.
Watching this trailer for ‘We are your friends’ makes me feel like a mayan watching the spanish fleet approaching
— 〽️ (@Mat_Zo) May 19, 2015
wow I think Im gonna puke, quit & move to the most remote place where “edm” doesn’t exist after watching “we are your friends” trailer. sad.
— ooah (glιтcн мoв) (@ooah) May 19, 2015
But is it as bad as some are predicting? No, it’s not. In fact, respected scenester Claude Vonstroke even remarked that “It was better than I thought it was going to be,” after the film’s premiere last week in Hollywood. Yes, I was eavesdropping.
The movie tells the story of Cole Carter, a ridiculously good-looking twentysomething from a less-than-glamorous area of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. For reasons never actually addressed but seemingly related to a hard-knock childhood, Cole lives in a guesthouse in the backyard of his best friend Mason’s parents. Along with Ollie and Squirrel, the guys comprise a quadruple threat that drives over the hill to Hollywood on the regular to party at Social, where Mason works the door, Cole does opening DJ duties, aspiring actor Ollie networks with the bottle service crowd, and Squirrel gets preyed upon by sexually aggressive lady clubbers. Are they bros? Maybe. Does it matter? Not really.
Cole, of course, has greater aspirations than playing for free drinks and gets his break when veteran DJ James (a spry, scene-stealing Wes Bentley, whose vague familiarity will drive you crazy until you realize he was the brooding artist dude in American Beauty) swoops him up from the alley behind the club (in a black luxury SUV, natch) and brings him to a scenetastic party populated with beautiful people and expensive art. Here, Cole has a mind-melting drug experience (depicted in a fairly cheesy animated sequence) and subsequently ends up sleeping on James’ couch. It is here that he encounters Sophie, James’ personal assistant/girlfriend, played by fellow prime human specimen Emily Ratajkowski, with whom Cole falls in quick lust. What the duo lacks in onscreen chemistry is made up for with shameless sequences of Efron in the shower and Ratajkowski gyrating on the dancefloor.
Cole’s is a coming-of-age story like any other, as James becomes his mentor and teaches him that simply downloading a bunch of generic beats does not an enduring track make. James even throws in a Juan Atkins reference to prove that he, and the filmmakers, understand that dance music history goes back further than 2011. The mixing techniques displayed throughout may not be perfect, but really, the same can be said for most electronic music festivals. That said, it was a thrill to see our very own EDC Vegas depicted in the film.
Intermittently funny (most often when Bentley is in the scene), WAYF has a sense of self-awareness about the fact that a lot of dance music veterans think modern EDM is bogus, and it mines that generation gap for material. While it lacks the boundary-pushing style and indie grit of films that have previously documented the world of dance music—like Go and Human Traffic—even that seems apropos, as the current moment WAYF depicts is one in which the culture has, to a certain extent, been scrubbed clean of a lot of the gritty vestiges of the underground that spawned it.
Warning: spoilers ahead!
That’s not to say that there isn’t some darkness. For their day jobs, the guys work for a corrupt, Lamborghini-driving real estate agent who hustles innocent people out of their foreclosed-on homes. James has a drinking problem and cheats on his girlfriend. After punching Cole in a bathroom stall, he announces that things in life happen “that finish you” and you have to go on living anyway, a tidy foreshadowing of Squirrel’s death by drug overdose after a night of hard partying.
The death finds Cole and his crew wrecked, at least for a few scenes. Ultimately, of course, the beat goes on, with Cole gathering his strength (and the field samples he’s made at various Valley locales) to play a big-time set at the fictitious Summerfest. The climactic scene has depth, but might have been better without so much footage of Efron thumping his fist on his heart to emphasize how much he really feels this music. And while actual DJs including Dillon Francis, Nicky Romero, Posso and Alesso all make appearances, it’s a lost opportunity that the film doesn’t dig deeper into the worlds of any superstar DJs to reveal the realities of their high-flying lifestyles.
In the end, We Are Your Friends is neither vapid nor profound, but it is entertaining, sometimes witty, and shot in an easily digestible style that often feels like the onscreen equivalent of an Instagram feed. It’s also timely. As a lot of mega-brands have noticed, there’s a shit-ton of money to be made in this space at the moment, and it was only a matter of time until Hollywood capitalized on the popularity of the scene by reflecting it back at us. While that, like some of the music itself, might not sit well with purists, it’s also what makes We Are Your Friends the furthest evolution of modern mainstream dance music culture to date.
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