The Smiths

(On Cable TV, December 2021) The recent glut of movies that act as homage to older musical acts is as interesting as it’s exasperating — I’m sure that the fans love it, but it can leave the rest of us in the cold. There’s also a fair amount of juvenile gatekeeping built in those films, something that seems even worse in Shoplifters in the World. This is a film about The Smiths and a few particularly obsessive fans, one of them so distraught by the band’s breakup that he goes to the trouble of holding hostage a hard-rock radio DJ so that the station’s format goes to all-The Smith all-the-time while he’s holding the gun. This, in the universe of the film, is seen as an unqualified good — a way to bring The Smiths to the masses, to teach everyone that the sum of musical culture is contained in The Smiths and that their lives have no meaning without The Smiths. The fundamental goodness of The Smiths is so self-obvious that even the DJ threatened by death is gradually won over to the cause. (This could work in a comedy, except that Shoplifters of the World is executed as small-scale drama.)  Meanwhile, our sad-sack circa-1987 teenage characters go from terminal small-town existential angst to meaningless partying while The Smiths take over the airwaves and everything gets better. Despite my dripping sarcasm, the film isn’t that bad — Helena Howard is cute, Joe Manganiello is very likable as the DJ, the sense of late-1980s teenage alienation is evocative and there’s something to be said about this film being an anti-Hugues take on similar material. But as much as Shoplifters of the World works overtime to wallow in the legacy of The Smiths, it seems to be working just as hard to exclude those who are not fans. By the time the hijacker finally gets arrested, we’re more tempted to think, “Finally! No more of that music!” than being particularly sympathetic to his upcoming legal issues.