Class project High grades School of Rock BY PETER KEOUGH
	School of Rock Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Mike White. With Jack Black, Joan Cusack, Mike White, Sarah Silverman, Joey Gaydos Jr., Maryam Hassan, Kevin Clark, Rebecca Brown, Robert Tsai, Caitlin Hale, Aleisha Allen, and Miranda Cosgrove. A Paramount Pictures release. 108 minutes. At the Boston Common, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.
	Big Black   What ruined rock and roll? According to Dewey Finn, the struggling rock-and-roller played by Jack Black in School of Rock, who finds himself shaping a classroom full of rich kids into kick-ass metal bands, rock sold its soul to MTV. Which, of course, didn’t stop Black himself from showing up at the recent MTV award ceremonies dressed like Michael Jackson in a funny stunt that almost upstaged the notorious Britney-Madonna kiss. Overall, however, Black, the whirligig embodiment of social impropriety in films such as Jesus’ Son, High Fidelity, and Orange County, was not impressed with the ceremony. "I thought it was pretty lame, to tell you the truth. Chris Rock did a good job and his monologue was funny. I thought he was really funny the first time he hosted, but that was a lot to live up to. But aside from Madonna’s make-out session, it was pretty dry." Was he tempted to lock lips with Justin Timberlake? "That would have topped it," says Black. "But you know, there’s a double standard. It’s all right for women to make out, in fact it’s sexy, but if men make out it’s just disgusting. What is that about? How come women don’t go, ‘Yeah, oh that is hot!’ If a dude makes out with a dude, good luck getting a job. I think it would be the end of my career." On the other hand, for an out-there kind of guy like Black, working in a kids’ picture like School of Rock might also have career-altering implications. Both for him and for indie director Richard Linklater (Slacker). "It’s new territory for Richard, for sure," says Black. "I’ve already been dealing with some mainstream movies so it’s not a jump in that respect. It’s a kids’ movie, but with Mike White [Chuck and Buck] writing it, I knew it was going to be cool. And I had already been feeling like I should do some kind of kids’ thing, even though I’m pretty raunchy — with my band, anyway, I have a comedy routine that I do — we work pretty blue." His band, the hilarious Spinal Tap-like Tenacious D, has a Tipper-sticker on the label. "Yeah, I’ve got the parental advisory on the CD, but it’s also very childish. That’s part of my energy — I’m kind of a kid. A lot of kids want my autograph and I was like, ‘Something is going on here, I should do something for the kids.’ I’d like to do something good because most kids’ movies are lame, and there used to be some good ones like Bad News Bears. That’s just a great flick and what’s-his-name, Walter Matthau — amazing performance. And when you see that performance you don’t say, ‘Oh yeah, he did a kids’ movie.’ You just go, ‘Man, he kicks ass,’ and he was kind of rough on the kids and you know you love him, and you see how good he is with the kids in the end." Where Matthau’s curmudgeon had baseball to reach his charges, Black’s slacker has rock and roll. Not surprisingly, the parents in School forbid their kids to listen to the stuff, something Black can relate to. "My mom went through this Jew for Jesus phase. She’d be embarrassed if she reads this — whatever, everyone has their searching. She had this tape where this preacher was talking about the evils of rock and how Satan was going to corrupt your children: ‘For instance, let me show you an example, this is a song by the band called Blue Oyster Cult,’ and he’d play a snippet of it. He was anti-Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and somehow Todd Rundgren got in there as one of the purveyors of Satan’s teachings. All it did for me was turn me on to some great music that I didn’t even know about until I heard it and got really into heavy metal. "The Christian tape did the dirty work for me. If I ever meet that preacher I have to thank him for turning me on to all those great bands." School of Rock opens this Friday at area theaters. — PK

The schoolroom is a microcosm of an oppressive society, which is why it works so well as a film setting. Films like Zero for Conduct, If . . . , Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, to name just a few, remind viewers of their first experience of getting squashed by the system and of the vain dream of fighting back. Fighting back has ceased to be fashionable in these post-Columbine days of security cameras, metal detectors, and bowdlerized textbooks, and being squashed is all the rage, which makes Richard Linklater’s accomplishment in School of Rock all the more remarkable. It’s a subversive film that affirms family values, a feel-good flick that doesn’t make you ashamed to feel that way.

Remarkable, yes, but also implausible. The basic premise — slacker musician Dewey Finn (Jack Black) pretends to be a teacher and forges his 10-year-old students into a rock band — wouldn’t get past the armed guard at the shabbiest inner-city public school, let alone the venerable walls of tony Horace Green Elementary, the finest in the state, as Principal Mullins (Joan Cusack) proudly points out, and no doubt the most expensive. But apparently not the most alert, as Dewey takes on his roommate Ned Schneebly’s (Mike White) identity as a certified sub, puts on a bow tie and battered jacket, and tells the uniformed sixth-graders under his charge to take a perpetual recess.

Perhaps Mullins falls for Dewey’s bull for the same reason the audience does — sheer delight in Black’s manic exuberance, vanity, self-delusion, and absurdity. He should win most viewers over in the film’s opening minutes as he takes a guitar solo for his band and stage dives into the waiting arms of — nobody. That pratfall can’t shatter his illusions of being a rock god, however, nor is he daunted when his own band cans him for his showboating. These setbacks only intensify his bitterness and determination, his conviction that it’s not his lack of talent that’s holding him back, but the machinations of "the Man."

"The Man," the faceless authority who frustrates or exploits all desires, is the topic of his first lesson, delivered when his offer of recess is declined ("I have a hangover," he says. "Does anybody know what that is?"). Now in the position of "the Man" himself, Dewey doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of those under his control. Noting their talent when he overhears them playing during a music class, he schemes to turn them into a new band that he can take to an upcoming contest offering a big cash prize.

But to paraphrase David St. Hubbins, there’s a fine line between cynicism and idealism. To convince the class that the "project" is worthwhile or possible, Dewey must shake them out of their repressed, bourgeois shells (and generic stereotypes) to find the rockers within. He does this partly through a curriculum of pre-MTV music heavy on the Led Zeppelin side of the spectrum, with videos of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, and the like in action — a kind of Dead Rockers Society.

Mostly, though, he teaches by example, usually negative: he performs an autobiographical tune that combines Jethro Tull-like mythmaking with his petulant anger at his treacherous former bandmates and his resentment at paying rent and that rivals the tiny monolith moment in This is Spinal Tap for its celebration of deflated delusions of grandeur.

So Dewey learns something about responsibility, and his kids — all precisely cast and utterly convincing — learn something about freedom, and no one should be unmoved by the film’s rousing finale (on a par with that of 8 Mile, though rated PG-13). True, School falls briefly victim to the unfortunate rock tradition of misogyny; Schneebly’s girlfriend, Patty (Sarah Silverman), is an irredeemable and humorless shrew. Luckily, Cusack’s performance as Mullins more than compensates for that lapse: her transformation upon hearing Stevie Nicks’s "Edge of Seventeen" on a jukebox is heartwarming and hilarious.

As for Linklater’s direction, his contribution is simplicity and compassionate detachment, an uncluttered style that allows the performers — from the ubiquitous Black to the shyest youngster — to share the spotlight. And Linklater possesses the rare gift of irony without condescension. I don’t know how he manages to cut from Dewey’s line "I want no late nights drinking tequila and trying to get lucky" to a shot of the kids’ earnest faces without being coy or smug, but the laugh is as innocent as the kids themselves. Let’s hope Hollywood finds it a learning experience.