We Are Your Friends movie review: straight outta the Valley

by MaryAnn Johanson

Imitation is suicide,” scolds celebrity dance DJ James Reed (Wes Bentley: Interstellar) to the hot up-and-comer, Cole Carter (Zac Efron: Neighbors), he has taken under his wing. Which is highly ironic, because We Are Your Friends couldn’t be more derivative of every single hungry-young-artist movie you’ve ever seen. Cole loathes his crappy workaday life in the unfashionable San Fernando Valley and dream of bigger and better things in the more glamorous parts of Los Angeles on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. Are Cole’s less enlightened friends holding him back and embarrassing him in front of James? Will James’s gorgeous and much-younger girlfriend, Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski: Entourage), threaten to come between mentor and mentee? You know it. But director and coscreenwriter Max Joseph, in his feature debut, isn’t content to merely ape narrative tropes of an already overly explored genre: he has made a movie that looks like an advertisement for a soft drink or tampons or sneakers or a cell phone — any product that wants you to associate it with fresh! active! fun! young! people. Efron’s usual appeal is lost among it. Not lost, because it’s so literal, so on-the-nose, is Joseph’s depiction of all the personal experience and tragedy that goes into a man’s art, as Cole electronically samples the sounds of the Valley and turns them into a dance soundtrack for fresh! active! fun! young! people to groove to. Or perhaps to buy sneakers to.