Tapping into the rock scene

Before he made the thrillers “The Crow” and “Dark City,” Australian director Alex Proyas shot music videos for such bands as Crowded House and INXS. His memory of that experience is keen.

“Rock ‘n’ roll stardom is the most extreme level of success a young person might achieve,” he says. “It is something you can literally achieve within a few months, and when you’re [too] young to accept and appreciate it.

“Having been on stage shooting bands, feeling this extraordinary energy coming at them from the crowd -- this absolute adoration -- I don’t know how these people deal with it,” he says. “Obviously, some people don’t deal with it very well.”

Proyas used his experience in “Garage Days,” a film he co-wrote and directed, about a fictional Sydney rock band. (It opens in Los Angeles on Friday.) It’s a different kind of project for him -- DiY scruffy, an optimistic sex-drugs-and-rock romp with screwball-comedy impulses hiding some scary insights (and psychedelic hallucinations) about the lifestyle.

Kick Gurry is the shambling, lovable dreamer of a lead singer, Freddy, in an engaging ensemble cast. It’s hard to tell if Freddy’s voice is a good one, however, since “Garage Days” pointedly, playfully keeps the band’s talent -- or lack of it -- ambiguous.

“There have been a lot of movies made about more successful bands,” Proyas says by telephone from Vancouver, where he’s shooting “I, Robot” with Will Smith. “I wanted to make a movie about a band that wouldn’t necessarily make it. The whole message is that even if you don’t make it, it’s OK as long as you’re doing something that you love doing. You don’t have to have it validated by money and fame.”

After the stardom

The road-to-rock stardom -- as well as the long journey back from it -- has become its own movie genre, which includes everything from Tom Hanks’ friendly “That Thing You Do!” to Russ Meyer’s exploitative “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” More new films are en route. “Prey for Rock & Roll,” starring Gina Gershon as the 40-year-old leader of a struggling female band, is scheduled for this year. Mary Harron, director of “I Shot Andy Warhol” and a former rock journalist, is in pre-production on “Please Kill Me,” about New York’s punk scene of the 1970s.

Some of the best rock-band movies -- such as the “mockumentary” “This Is Spinal Tap” and Allison Anders’ bittersweet “Sugar Town,” a look at L.A.’s music community that features Duran Duran’s John Taylor as an aging member of a hit group -- fantasize about what happens after the stardom is gone.

“That’s the most interesting story in a lot of ways,” says Anders, who recently taught a course in rock movies at UC Santa Barbara. “Rock stardom is really built to only last about five years and then they have to do something else. If they survive, they become far more interesting people.”

For Gurry, the Australian actor who stars in “Garage Days,” rock-band characters are inherently fascinating. “It’s such an erratic life, and that’s such a great place to start when creating a character,” he says during lunch at Los Angeles’ Flora Kitchen. He’s been in town working on David Mamet’s new film, a political thriller.

“These musicians and rock stars have no structure to their life whatever, their life is totally erratic -- their relationships with people, their lifestyle, the food they eat, when they eat, and whether they pay for it or not,” he says. “At one moment, they have 50,000 people going crazy, and the next minute they’re in a hotel room on their own.”

Beatles an inspiration

Surprisingly few rock-band movies have been hugely successful on initial release. Fortunately, one of the first -- the Beatles’ 1964 “A Hard Day’s Night” -- was a sensation.

“That’s an incredibly important film,” says director Harron, from New York. “They’re playing a fantasy of themselves -- it’s scripted as a fantasy. I saw it when I was 10 years old, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It was what everyone wanted the Beatles to be, irreverent but light and surreal.”

Many subsequent rock-band movies have been clueless about their very subject matter -- “Breaking Glass” and “Rock Star,” for instance -- and deservedly bombed. But there are gems awaiting rediscovery.

Bruce McDonald’s 1996 “Hard Core Logo,” a naturalistic “mockumentary” about a Canadian punk band’s reunion tour, is darker, meaner and far scarier than “Spinal Tap” and features a devastating turn by Hugh Dillon as the lead singer. And Brian Gibson’s 1998 “Still Crazy,” a comedy about an aging British band’s attempt to reunite, features Bill Nighy’s sensational performance as the insecure yet vain lead singer -- half Ozzy and half David Lee Roth.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,” made by Lou Adler in 1982, has won a cult following for its prescience and fine acting. Diane Lane is an alienated Pennsylvania teen who forms a primitive all-girl trio with her sister and a friend played by Laura Dern. While on tour with a fiery, Clash-like British punk band led by the stormy, angry Ray Winstone, her band becomes a hit with young women, partly by putting skunk-like stripes in their hair.

Anders thinks directors of a certain age, those whose adolescence came before the video age, became interested in the arts through rock as much as through movies. And making movies about rock may be a way of paying tribute.

“My generation didn’t have videotape or DVDs to watch movies over and over again, but we did have this with vinyl,” she says. “I could listen to records over and over again. To me, music was more of a signifier than film because I could immerse myself in it.

“I could stack records at night and that’s how I went to sleep,” she says. “I was obsessed with the Beatles, then the McCoys, the Shangri-Las, and I read teen magazines and was always interested in what people were doing. I always found infinite drama in the rock and pop-idol lifestyle.”