The film industry should never be trusted to properly depict a current subculture. It takes a long time to make a movie, so long that the people of any given subculture have probably moved on by the time a script can even get funding. This slowness combined with the tendency of producers to protect their investments with art-killing mass appeal is a recipe for disaster when making a film about an ephemeral party culture. Whether it's a cash-in or a genuine labor of love, a music movie has a better chance of missing the point than it does of actually capturing the essence of the scene it celebrates.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

So, here's the funny part about John Badham and Robert Stigwood's wildly successful disco movie Saturday Night Fever: It's based on a mostly fictional article in New York Magazine. The short version is that the article's author, Nik Cohn, was a British journalist who had only been in America long enough to know not to drive on the left side of the road when he penned "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", an analysis of the burgeoning disco scene that Cohn made up almost whole-cloth after a few unsuccessful attempts to insinuate himself within the subculture. Thanks to his mythical but stirring portrayal of New York's hottest dance clubs, Cohn paved the way for a short-lived and memorable shadow-subculture that suffered the same meteoric rise and cruel backlash as any fad. It probably didn't help that Saturday Night Fever promoted an utterly vapid version of the disco scene that wouldn't survive the inevitable rise of its audience's maturity.

Groove (2000)

Rave culture, like some kind of pressure-adapted fish from the deepest, darkest part of the ocean, died almost as soon as it came to the surface. Like disco, electronic music was the stuff of underground parties, clubs unknown to the trendy set and artists who had no eye for the big time. Also like disco, the rave scene collapsed when it got popular enough to attract the fickle majority rather than just the dedicated minority. Greg Harrison's low-budget rave movie Groove straddles both the time and circumstances that led to the scene's dissolve. It's not to say that raves don't happen anymore or that they're not good, just that the giddy innovation that drove the best of them in the late 90's and early 00's is long gone. Groove takes place over the course of a single night, mostly at an illegal warehouse rave in San Francisco. Despite the appearance of a few respected DJ's and a soundtrack that ignores the pop-techno of the day in favor of proper House and Trance, Groove still can't help reducing the rave scene to a bunch of neon hippies eating drugs like they're Pez. It's that very inaccurate and reductive idea that ultimately killed the electronic music party culture.

School of Rock (2003)

The odd thing about Richard Linklater and Mike White's comedy School of Rock is that it's a pretty solid movie, it just inadvertently says some unflattering things about the nature of America's favorite music scene. Its premise is that a floundering, would-be rock star can turn a class full of pre-teens into genuine rockers in a matter of months just by giving them a little music history and teaching them some meaningless mannerisms. In the end, the movie suggests that rock is little more than a formula that can applied to literally anyone and transform them into gods of head-banging. I'm not sure that was the point, but that's the message School of Rock sends behind its funny script and especially talented cast.