Teen Spirit Is a Mechanically Made Musician Movie

Over in the Isle of Wrights, there lives a teenage girl named Violet Valenski (Elle Fanning), who carries dreams of being a singer while going to school and working shifts at a local tavern despite her mother, Marla (Agnieszka Grochowska), sternly disapproving of her music ambitions. A local singing competition called Teen Spirit (hey, that's the name of the show!) gives Violet the chance to chase her music dreams. Teaming up with a Croatian former opera singer by the name of Vlad (Zlatko Buric) as her mentor, Violet decides to go forth and pursue her dreams. Challenges lie in wait as she struggles to balance respecting the people who have already helped her and embracing the people who could help her career go even farther. Will she ever get the best of both worlds?


It's been a blue moon since I saw a modern movie whose production aesthetic runs so counter to its actual story and not in a good way. Under the direction of Max Minghella, Teen Spirit is filmed in a manner reminiscent of present-day somber independent cinema or a particularly poignant Nationwide insurance commercial. Unless Violet is on stage performing, colors in the various sets run on the muted side of things while those sets are typically brought to life with minimal amounts of lighting. What lighting there is comes in the form of natural pores of light flooding through any nearby windows, a sign that cinematographer Autumn Dural has clearly been studying Janusz Kaminski's work in Steven Spielberg movies!

There's also a hefty supply of those lens flares J.J. Abrams loves so much, moodily-filmed dialogue-free shots of Violet in a field with her beloved horse, an abundance of close-up shots and all kinds of other filming traits that are intended to indicate what a serious production this is. Teen Spirit isn't a badly-filmed production at all, there are some nice examples of well-executed pieces of prolonged camerawork in here like an extended single take of Violet, realizing her pet horse is being sold, racing into her home to confront her mother. But the way in which it tries to communicate a sense of emotional momentousness to the story of Violet Valenski frequently come off as solely derivative of other movies and filmmakers (hence the Kaminski and Abrams references) rather than as ways of connecting with the characters in Teen Spirit.

Of course, the unimaginative visual ways of conveying a more serious tone are only part of the problem with Teen Spirit's tone. There's also the problem that Max Minghella's script doesn't really justify why everything in the movie is so gosh-darn serious. The screenplay is mechanically going through the motions of every A Star is Born-esque storyline save for the one novel storytelling trait that Rebecca Hall's music agent character doesn't end up becoming an unstoppable antagonist. Otherwise, Teen Spirit is a movie so lacking in originality in its basic plot points that it could really use some intentionally trashy fun to spruce things up a bit.

A lack of originality in a movie is always forgivable if the movie itself is fun to watch. Instead of leaning into the entertaining kitsch possibilities in telling a script for a Mary-Kate/Ashley Olsen movie with the cinematography, tonal and directorial sensibilities of Jean-Marc Valle, Teen Spirit staunchly plants its feet in telling its story in a rote manner that makes fun something the feature has no time for. The only time it really grabbed my attention is in some of Violet's Teen Spirit performances. Though they're executed in a manner that makes them feel like stand-alone music videos that somehow got spliced into a feature film, they do tend to have actual personality, mainly thanks to some pieces of energetic editing that do a fine job of digging into the psyche of Violet.

This is especially discernible in Violet's very first Teen Spirit performance, which sees the camera rapidly cutting between her performance for the judges and flashes of her more intimate homelife. The performance segments of Teen Spirit, which are, admittedly, far from flawless (there's a stunning lack of extravagance in the choreography and set design of what are supposed to be some really big TV musical performances, for instance) aren't around enough to really raise the quality of the movie all that much. However, they do give a glimpse into a much better version of Teen Spirit that was more concerned with the experiences of its lead character and being interesting to watch rather than being so focused on being relentlessly somber.