THAT THING THEY DIDN'T

Even without the presence of James Gandolfini in the cast, Not Fade Away would be recognizable as the work of Sopranos creator David Chase. It’s made in Chase’s signature style—the same short, elliptical vignettes, starting and ending suddenly, often leaping forward in time, leaving much for the audience to infer about their significance, and about what’s happened in between.

It can be a potent storytelling method, liberating both filmmaker and audience from tiresome, de rigueur narrative tropes. It has its limitations, too, and Chase runs into them here, not for the first time. But for the first half or so of its length, it frees Not Fade Away from coming-of-age movie sentiment and preciousness.

Not Fade Away is about a rock band in New Jersey in the ‘60s. John Magaro is our hero, the usurping lead singer, Gandolfini and Molly Price are superb as his disappointed working-class parents, and Bella Heathcote is his willowy muse from the other side of the tracks. A bunch of fine, funny, authentic-seeming guys play the other band members. The movie isn’t a show-biz story, however. The focus is much more on family life and girlfriends, college and summer jobs, dinner table squabbles about long hair and Vietnam.

The band plays a few gigs over a few years, shows some promise, teeters on the edge not of stardom but of simple professionalism, as opposed to adolescent goofing off. But they’re doomed by internal egos and envies and agendas. They don’t become one-hit wonders, like the guys in That Thing You Do! They don’t even have their one glorious performance, like the title ensemble of The Commitments. They’re no-hit wonders.

Chase wants find the value and importance even in this abortive venture, and he does find some. He has a firm grasp of what, ultimately, being a rock musician is for: Getting laid. But that’s not the same as what rock music, itself, is for—the soul-deepening comforts and exhilarations it can provide to its listeners and practitioners. Chase gets past the vulgarity of the desire to hit the rock-star lottery, even if his characters don’t, and gives a hint of the growth that music has given them, without their awareness.

But in the second half, as the both the band and the hero’s romance begin to fracture into disillusionment, the movie just keeps going and going. After a while, especially after the hero and heroine leave Jersey for California, it’s like a guy in a bar boring you with an over-detailed account of his long-lost youth. There’s a lovely final coda involving the hero’s little sister (the charming Meg Guzulescu) asserting the cosmic importance of rock-n-roll, but if it’s somehow intended to pull the whole movie together, it doesn’t come close.

I doubt it is so intended, however. As the non-ending of his Sopranos series finale showed, Chase has an aversion to offering dramatic resolution. Brilliant though he is, I find this a failing, and I found that last episode a failure. The desire to confound audience expectation is perhaps commendable; deliberately leaving your audience unsatisfied is less so. Not Fade Away has the same attitude, and unlike the Soparanos finale, it doesn’t even have the virtue of abruptness. Despite the title, fade away—slowly and morosely—is just what this movie does.