YOU INSTEAD

Where the film falls down, though, is in that conceit, of taking a bunch of actors and a camera to a music festival and improvising a movie out of it. The problem is, that improvised movie just isn’t very good. The narrative is a one-trick pony, and the moment where Adam and Morello are manacled together happens in the first five minutes of the film. We know nothing about them and have very little context for them, so this event holds little significance other than being vaguely funny. From then, the film continues to flog this event, but it just isn’t interesting enough to hold focus, and also isn’t helped by documentary-style footage of the festival being sliced between story beats. It’s a flimsy narrative that doesn’t have anywhere near enough meat on it to keep it standing.

Another problem is the characters - they are nothing but the usual festival and music stereotypes. Adam and Morello, by virtue of being the centre of the film, have a bit more development than others, and are helped immensely by the natural charm of the actors, especially Natalia Tena, whose spunk and humour gives the film some life. All the secondary characters, however, are woeful, and often feel like nothing more than self-conscious obstacles to throw in the way. Alastair Mackenzie and Ruta Gedmintas, as the pair's partners, seem only to be there to get in the way of Adam and Morello’s building romance, and that self-consciousness is painfully obvious. In the end, what you have is an hour and a half of film following actors wandering around a music festival who are not entirely sure what they should be doing.

The unfortunate result of this poor storytelling is that the footage of the festival itself is infinitely more fascinating than the narrative, and I found myself wishing that Mackenzie had simply made a documentary built around either the event itself and the experience of it, like in ‘Woodstock’ or ‘Glastonbury’ (2006), or followed the experiences of one of the bands, like in ‘Gimme Shelter’. He is given the rare opportunity to document an epic social event, in itself a fascinating snapshot of a generation, and wastes it by being both too ambitious and not ambitious enough. You get the feeling this whole film was far too rushed by attempting to take advantage of a situation without careful consideration of what to do with that opportunity.

What you are left with in the end is an utterly inconsequential and forgettable film, devoid of any real purpose other than to say "music festivals are cool". Even the classic festival films had more to say than that. We aren’t really left caring about Adam and Morello and their fairytale romance. Theirs just gets in the way of the romance happening behind them, thousands of people in the act of creating and receiving music. ‘You Instead’ makes you wish you were watching that film instead of this one.