I'm puzzled as to why I found We Are Your Friends so entertaining.
Maybe the music was getting to me, subconsciously. All I can say is that the same monotonous beat seems to continue all the way through, and that near the end, the music is very explicitly associated with a staple gun banging shingles onto the roof. So much for the musical score.
Except that We Are Your Friends, like Meryl Streep's Ricki and the Flash, makes no claim that its protagonist, Zac Efron, is particularly talented, and that very modesty kept We Are Your Friends from annoying me the way most movies about show business do.
And the movie is so little obsessed with show business that at one point, my notes read, "Is this a movie about telemarketing?" We get about as much formal instruction on that as we do about music.
But the result isn't realistic complexity, it's about the movie having no narrative or thematic spine to hold the episodes together. Even its techniques are inconsistent: the animations illustrating the effects of drugs soon disappear, as do the quick cuts and plash pans that blur past too fast to let us see what the characters are responding to.
Despite all that, and despite myself, I ended up enjoying We Are Your Friends.
