Prey For Rock and Roll

Reviewed by Rich Drees

     At its core rock music is about the expression of youthful energy, anger and joy. It’s unfortunate then that Prey For Rock and Roll is such a turgid, moribund and lifeless affair.

     Jacki (Gina Gershon) is facing some hard facts about her life. Just days before her fortieth birthday, she finds that despite having played and lead a variety of rock bands on the Los Angeles music scene for 20 years, she still hasn’t had much success. The gigs she’s able to land for her latest group Clam Dandy pay so little that each member of the quartet gets $13.50 at the end of the night. “Not even enough to support my eyeliner habit,” Jacki informs us in a voiceover.

     When the band gets a slot on big area concert and a small independent label begins to show some interest in the band Jacki thinks that her time has finally come. But things quickly start to unravel. Jacki and bassist Tracy (Drea de Matteo) are arguing over Tracy’s excessive drinking and drug use. Tensions are further heightened when drummer Sally’s (Shelly Cole) brother Animal (Marc Blucas) shows up, freshly out of prison and needing a place to stay. Things boil over when Tracy’s equally substance-abusing boyfriend Chuck (Eddie Driscoll) hits her in a drunken rage and then rapes Sally. While Animal and Jacki do extract revenge of Chuck, there are still other hurtles to leap before the band’s big show.

     Prey For Rock and Roll is a relentlessly bleak movie. Tragedy continues to befall its characters with a surprising regularity, as if the screenwriter felt compelled to heap a disaster on her characters every 20 pages or so. By the time the film’s final tragedy hits, there’s no shock as the audience has been numbed by the relentless parade calamity. It’s just too much to take and the upbeat ending feels particularly forced. The ending of the film isn’t helped by some rather clichéd dialog

     The script paints its characters in the broadest of strokes, without much nuance at all. Jacki and Sally were both sexually abused as children while Tracy’s excessive behavior is written off with one line about her being a “trust fund baby”. Petty’s Faith doesn’t even get the courtesy of a vague back story. All we know is that she is involved in a relationship with Sally and she teaches guitar.

     Any movie about rock and roll is of course going to be dependant on the music created for the project. Unfortunately, the songs here aren’t quite that great. With the exception of “Every Six Minutes,” the song Jacki writes after Sally’s rape, the rest of the songs the band plays in the movie are fairly bland, standard rock tunes. It’s no surprise then that the band hasn’t been signed to a recording contract.

     Having spent much of the 1990’s freelance writing about my own regional music scene, part of the film’s premise just didn’t ring true for me. With the rapid drop in costs for home recording equipment and compact disc manufacturing, it seemed ridiculous to me that these four girls were pinning all their hopes on receiving a recording contract. Many unsigned bands go out and make their own albums, controlling all aspects of the product from start to finish. For a character like Jacki to have been in the business for 20 years and not have gone that route seems incredibly stupid on her part.

     There are brief moments that work. The two short scenes of Gershon checking over her reflection in the mirror for telltale signs of aging and the birthday dinner she shares with her family reveal more of her character than the rest of the film combined. The relationship between Faith and Sally works well mostly do to the work of the two actresses.