The band is not the best, but the the film is one of the best about adolescent girls.
We are the Best!
Grade: B
Director: Lukas Moodysson (Mammoth)
Screenplay: Moodysson, from Coco Moodysson comic book
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grossin
Rating: NR
Runtime: 102 min.
by John DeSando
“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.” Freeman Dyson
This girl punk band is definitely not the best, but their story is one of the best little films you will see about adolescence, its ennui, and its creativity. Three young girls around 12 are stereotypically bored with their parents and in love with rock n roll, out of which love they transcend their soporific life by forming a band.
If for nothing else, We are the Best! is exclaiming the transformative power of music to lift spirits and connect with the world, this time outside of Stockholm in 1982, when singing about Brezhnev and Reagan and the danger of nuclear anything makes electric music and connects young, disaffected pseudo-punk girls with excitement and a small part of the outside world.
The actresses are natural, attractive, and invested in being adolescents although I suspect they long ago passed 12 years old. Director Lucas Moodysson, adapting his wife, Coco’s graphic novel has caught the silliness and loneliness of young girls who, with little talent but loads of chutzpah can be happy with a life they, not adults, frame for themselves.
Thus they become the best for themselves.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
