SXSW review: Teen Spirit is a dazzling backstage musical

Max Minghella’s directorial debut is an exhilarating musical drama that understands why music is so compelling with lead Elle Fanning at her fiercest.

The pop star may be a dying breed in the world of music, but on film they’re more alive than ever. Just in the last year, Hollywood has released the likes of Vox Lux and A Star is Born where the intent is to show the last gasp of a dying star before sinking into a black hole of tragedy. It isn’t often a film in this subgenre arrives that’s upbeat, positive, and remembers why music connects with people so enthusiastically. Max Minghella’s directorial debut, Teen Spirit, is an exhilarating examination of not necessarily stardom, but the desire for importance and how music melds with memory to become something more.

Violet Valenski (Elle Fanning) is a 17-year-old girl living on the Isle of Wight. She spends her days working and going to school but in her free time loves to sing. When an opportunity to audition for the singing competition show Teen Spirit arrives, Violet jumps at it. Taking along a drunken former opera singer as her manager, Violet must grapple with her own inner demons to find her voice.

Stories about singers often devolve into exploring the perils or politics of fame, but Minghella  –making his directing and screenwriting debut — avoids that. In fact, he bypasses many of the stereotypical elements common to this genre of film while still utilizing its familiar structure.

Violet is the typical small-town girl living in a lonely world who, in this case, is an outsider both personally and culturally. Her mother (subtly played by Agnieszka Grochowska) believes Violet should leave her singing to the choir while the two struggle to make ends meet. The only freedoms Violet has are in riding her horse and singing.

Minghella doesn’t just capture the beauty of pop music but its visceral connections to moments in our life. Using a series of jump cuts that some might find annoying but lead to a string of goosebump-inducing moments, he tells the audience about Violet’s history through music. Fanning plaintively singing Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” opens up a flashback that lets the audience enter her inner mind, associating the lyrics with the all the pain the girl has experienced. Minghella retains this momentum throughout Teen Spirit, using music, framing, and editing to enhance the songs and the characters simultaneously.

Always exquisite, Teen Spirit is the movie that should prove Elle Fanning isn’t a little girl anymore. Her Violet is dour, genuine, and without guile. She isn’t made up throughout the movie, eschewing the typical pop star look of heavy makeup and midriff baring tops in favor of track suits and tank tops. Violet is a girl who just loves to sing and Fanning inhabits that like a second skin. The climax’s extended tracking shot, as Violet walks into her final performance, is akin to Timothee Chalamet’s final scene in Call Me By Your Name. Minghella places the camera in front of Fanning and lets the anxiety mount. You watch the confidence, terror, anxiousness, and power come through on Fanning’s face.

Joining Violet on her quest is Vlad (Zlatko Buric), a former opera star estranged from his daughter who spends his days drinking. Minghella avoids turning Vlad and Violet’s relationship into that of Svengali and Trilby. Buric plays the character as sad and detached, only coming alive in the moments where he can teach Violet how to sing better or be a part of her world.

The sheer pride he takes in her is evident which only makes their final scenes together all the more heartbreaking. Rebecca Hall has a minor role as Teen Spirit’s overseer and she also takes a minor character and gives her added humanity, though there should be much more of her here.

More than anything though it’s Teen Spirit’s music that will keep it in the public’s consciousness. Minghella certainly makes mini-music videos throughout, complete with strobe effects and neon lights, that could easily be construed as swallowing and stopping the film’s plot. But because the connection between the music and Violet’s personal love of it is established, the musical sequences show Violet’s transformation from wallflower to queen.

The final performance blows it out of the water, transcending any musical moment you may have seen in 2018. Chills are a constant here. The film isn’t about a girl winning a singing competition but finding her inner strength to overcome her past and her own flaws.

Teen Spirit could be called style over substance, but Minghella’s painterly eye and intoxicating aesthetic is infectious like the most immortal pop songs are. Elle Fanning stalks the stage with the ferocity of a true queen, and the soundtrack is killer. It’ll remind you why you love music.