Teen Spirit (2018)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) Every era has its inspiring myths giving hope against reason, and for some reason “winning a talent contest leading to fame and fortune” seems to endure despite ample evidence to the fantasy of it. (Seriously, how many “American Idol” contestants have become celebrities?)  But they’re nice stories and they make tidy films and Teen Spirit goes full bore on the most obvious version of it. At times, it overplays its hand—witness the intensely depressing first half-hour of the film, in which the miserable existence to be escaped through fame is described a bit too well and too glumly: As our heroine is introduced in her dead-end life with an oppressive family and an existence in the middle of Nowhere, UK (specifically the Isle of Wright), viewers will want to get out of there much sooner than she does. (Hey, there’s the fast-forward button…) Things improve, slightly, once she heads over to London and the typical sell-your-soul-to-the-devil stuff starts. While the devil happens to be played in this case by the always-fetching Rebecca Hall, she doesn’t leave much of an impression here, as she merely walks in and out of frame a few times. Anyway—our heroine wins, the end. There’s nothing much more to it, and perhaps one day we’ll ask the right questions about pretending something so patently improbable that it probably has a negative influence on its audience.