Loud (if Lonely) Praise for ‘Pump Up the Volume’ : Movies: A minority opinion on a Canadian film that deals with youthful alienation.

I used to think a lot about the loneliness of the long-distance critic. Often I had to see and respond to films before anybody knew what the consensus of the heavy-hitters on Manhattan Island would be. No meaningful reviews were thought to exist west of the Hudson, let alone Dodge City.

What you saw as a triumph, the Easterners could subsequently demolish as unfit for human consumption. The film you dismissed could be hailed as unmatched in its luminous provocation since “Potemkin” and “My Son John.”

It was exhilarating either way, and I decided that whenever I was quoted in movie ads east of the Mississippi I must have been truly wrong and the distributor had had to reach all the way to the West Coast for a favoring opinion. Then again, criticism is an inexact science and there are pleasures in being out of step as well as in step.

I seem to be out of step on “Pump Up the Volume,” which according to the scoreboard in Entertainment magazine got no better than a low B grade and whose own critic trashed it with a C-minus. It was on the down side of mixed in these pages.

But Allan Moyle’s entertainment, harder-edged than John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club” but mirroring a similar kind of high school malaise, has much to recommend it.

Moyle, a Canadian who kept a journal through high school, has a sister who has taught high school in Montreal and had tales to tell, which became part of the plot. The film’s setting is Arizona but there seems no doubt that the contemporary high school experience is continental if not quite universal. Where a specifically Canadian input begins or ends would be impossible to say.

Christian Slater as Mark Hunter is the outsider in a new school--a familiar enough figure in high school stories, a loner who is likely to evoke memories of their own aloneness in many young viewers.

His parents have given him an elaborate ham radio set, presumably to keep in touch with his pals back East. But he can’t reach them or make face-to-face contact with the new kids. He can’t talk to anyone, except on the clandestine broadcasts from the garage in which he lets it all out.

Moyle has said that he saw Mark as Lenny Bruce and Holden Caulfield rolled into one. Slater’s a little young for the former and a bit old for the latter but there are certainly trace elements, and something of Jack Nicholson as the late-night FM talker in “The King of Marvin Gardens,” confessing his soul to the microphone.

The dirty talk and the furious pessimism of the boy’s broadcasts quickly make him an unknown folk hero, unrecognizable as the head-down moper in the high school corridors.

There are what I’ve sometimes called mine-field movies: scripts that tread so fine a line they can go blooey at any step. “Pump Up the Volume” deals more than incidentally with the power of a medium to influence behavior for good or for ill.

The anonymous hard-talker is at first seemingly free of responsibility for his actions. A young listener commits suicide. How, you ask yourself, is Moyle as writer and director going to deal with the implications of that? Mark’s response, or Moyle’s, gives the film some of its most eloquent, and affirmative, moments.

Still, “Pump Up the Volume” demands a reasonable amount of surrender. How can the parents, dense but loving, not be aware of the noisy goings-on in the garage? Would matters in general escalate quite so drastically, suggesting at last a gang of terrorists on the loose?

Yet the young audience with which I watched the film the other night went along with it. Whatever it has or hasn’t said to critics, it has set up reverberations in the audiences at which it was aimed.

It’s indubitably a commercial movie, made, amazingly, for less than $6 million, but given the kind of 800-print launching usually reserved for mid-sized blockbusters. The film’s strong ending does not quite forgive the broadcaster his sins, and it gives the film a lingering aftertaste along with such consoling satisfactions as there are.

The broadcaster’s despairs may arise from his feelings as an outsider. But they indict a society he finds empty, boring and goal-less. He seems to bespeak a sad sequel to the “Me, Too” generation; possibly the “Not Me, Either” generation.

The Angst and the angers are cloaked or complemented by the feverish sexual obsession common to teen-agers since approximately the 7th Century. But the prevailing message is clearly that the broadcaster and his contemporaries see themselves entering a world whose values seem to them awry and whose real problems are unfaced.

Whether, as some critics are saying, this gospel is simply a cynical playing to the self-pitying, self-indulgence of a young audience can’t be proved or disproved. (The film, to Moyle’s disappointment, is rated R, presumably in the main for its heavy language, luring some viewers but denying admission to others he feels would like to see it.)

The bad adults are very evil indeed, actively bad and not merely insensitive and indifferent, the usual charge against parents and other grown-ups in teen movies. They are the story’s principal concessions to commercial appeal, and to heavy humor.

Yet Moyle and co-producer Sandy Stern, who developed the project with Moyle, showed the script to a number of young people and the feedback suggested they had it about right.

There are some fine performances, including Slater’s as the boy and Ellen Greene as a sympathetic teacher. But the principal interest of “Pump Up the Volume” is that voice of discontent in the night, lonely and angry but struggling at last toward affirmation.