Electric Jesus (2020)

I had the joy of seeing this film with a live audience at the Nashville Film Festival. This movie is a fun, humorous and charming coming of stage story that follows the tropes of "the muse and artist" like Almost Famous (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181875/) with pointed and clever satire on Christian popular culture, in the vein of "Saved!" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332375/ ). The cast are mostly relative newcomers to acting, but create strong and believable performances, while also making room from appearances from veteran actors such as Brian Baumgartner (The Office) and Judd Nelson (Breakfast Club, and others). The dialogue is fun, sharp witty, and the soundtrack music is what the 80s sounds like at it's best, and the lyrics will cause you likely to laugh out loud, if you pay attention. Great story, heartfelt, fun and touching - you will love it.

’80s era movie-making legend John Hughes would be proud. Ironically set in the same neon rainbow decade as Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, Electric Jesus could be the next coming of age flick for a new generation (and old). It’s a teenage comedy that’ll be easy to watch over and over again. It takes a group of rag-tag teenagers, sets them on an adventure with mishaps galore, and they discover a little bit of who they are and what the world is like along the way. “In the summer of 1986, I ran sound for a Christian heavy metal band.” The main character, Erik (played by Andrew Eakle), narrates the movie for us, which starts with a frightening deer-in-the-headlights moment for 316 – a Christian heavy metal band caught playing in front of a “secular” audience that doesn’t want any part of their message music. This is a hilarious but cringe-worthy moment for any band that wilted in such an environment. The story then quickly unrolls from the beginning. Erik is a Christian rock music geek that found a way to join this local Christian metal band, 316, as a audio engineer. Cameron Crowe is another producer that could also be proud of this film. Not only does it give a believable glimpse of what it was like to grow up in America, but the authenticity of the background is impeccable. All the scenery is familiar to us – from the posters all over the garage-turned-rehearsal-room wall, the band names and music snippets dropped, to the “us versus them” mentality of trying to make Jesus famous in our subculture and world. The film jumps back ten weeks to a talent show at some Christian camp (Camp Harmony), where 316 cranks out the Stryper classic, “Makes Me Wanna Sing.” The elementary and middle school kids in the audience are jumping, the band is fully into it, and the jam is on. It’s so fun to see little details, like one of the camp counselors focus his attention squarely on the lead guitarist during the solo section. The drummer is doing his best “visual timekeeper” moves and smiles are flowing all around. Enter Skip Wick, an overweight middle-aged manager dressed like a ’70s-era used car salesman – complete with the bad toupee. He schmoozes the bands’ parents with a dazzling pitch about the summer tour he wants to take them on, adding sizzle with the potential for a record contract … all in the name of ministry, of course. So begins the adventure of a summer-long lifetime for these teens, complete with cheesy youth group shows in skating rinks and church sanctuaries to halfway-amused audiences and the token pizza dinners and sleeping on floors. Call it the most unglamorous summer rock tour ever. Ask your favorite Christian rock band if they have any memories like this. They will. “We’re doing this to make Jesus famous.” There’s a stowaway teenage girl incident, which happens when the band is already too far away from her home and much too close to their next showtime to turn the painted RV around and take her back home to her pastor daddy (played by Judd Nelson). It turns out she’s got talent, so an opening act and a love interest with Sarah and Erik is born. This film answers a lot of questions about the Christian subculture, especially in the context of those troublesome teenage years. Many of the clichés and accurate criticisms of Christian rock are rubbed in your face with a tongue firmly planted in cheek. I've seen it four times now and I can't wait to see it again (and again).