“A family wants to adopt her baby, but…they don’t want her.”
To the sounds of “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Clap Your Hands”, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love” and other sounds of the 60s, a young boy and a young girl come of age in yet another Canadian coming-of-age-in-the-1960s movie. Following on the heels of A No-Hit, No-Run Summer and Maman Est Chez Le Coiffeur, 45 R.P.M. is basically the same film. It’s still pretty good though, thanks to some decent performances by the stars, Jordan Gavaris and Justine Banszky, and some great character actors like Michael Madsen and Amanda Plummer.
Parry Tender (Gavaris) is fifteen years old, and he’s desperate to get out of the small, remote northern Canadian town in which he’s stuck. His tomboy best friend, Luke (Banszky), is even more desperate to leave than is Parry. (Luke is such an effective tomboy, in fact, that I didn’t even know she was a girl until about twenty minutes into the movie.) Of the two, Banszky is the better actor, and she also has the more compelling character in the end. The two of them decide that the best way to get out of their small town predicament is to win a radio contest being run by a big New York City radio station. Thanks to a strange atmospheric anomaly, they are able to get that station if they hold the radio just right on the roof of Parry’s house.
Parry is not really a very interesting main character. He’s similar to many other disaffected, withdrawn fifteen-year-olds in so many other movies, but that’s about it. He doesn’t go to school, and he has a pretty brutal personal history. But he doesn’t really talk to people, even those close to him, and he never really gave me any reason to like him. Luke, on the other hand, is a likeable young girl who appears to be in love with Parry, who remains oblivious. Complicating things is the pretty new girl in school, Debbie Baxter. Debbie is played by the very pretty Mackenzie Porter (incidentally, she is the sister of Canadian Idol guy Kalan Porter. Not that it matters. Just some trivia.)
Debbie’s father (Michael Madsen) has been stationed at the base in Northern Canada, and he’s the kindest, smartest adult in the whole movie. But he is badly underused. Also underused is Amanda Plummer, who plays Luke’s mother. She represents the other end of adulthood, and she is pretty much the ultimate Mother From Hell. The movie spends too much time on Parry and Luke, or Parry and Debbie. And Parry is just not as interesting as the other characters. Every time a conflict appears to be brewing between him and one of the girls, or him and his adoptive father, or him and the local cop, it disappears pretty quickly and nothing ever comes to a head.
The one thing that does come to a head is the story of Luke, who ends up being forced into a dramatic and devastating revelation that will change her life and Parry’s forever. Which is pretty standard for a coming-of-age-in-the-60s movie. In the end, this is just a standard movie. It’s OK, and it paints a nice picture of small-town Canada, remote youth culture in the 60s, and the Cold War tension in military towns. But there isn’t much more to the film, the radio contest proves to be ultimately irrelevant (aside from providing an excellent soundtrack) and without some good performances (especially that of Banszky), it could be pretty boring and pretty bad. 45 R.P.M. comes out on DVD June 16th from Alliance Films.
