Growing in up in LA Jacki (Gina Gershon) always knew she wanted to be a rock and roll star.
"I was this dorky 7th grader when I had my first real cool experience. Ike and Tina Turner at the Hollywood Bowl. Suddenly the idea of becoming a teacher or a nurse lost its edge. Sorry, Mom."
According to Jacki, watching punk icons X at the Whiskey A Go Go on LA's Sunset Strip was a pivotal experience
"I left that show knowing I had to have my own band. So I got an electric guitar, learned three chords and conned some chicks into starting a band with me."
Twenty years later Jacki is still toiling away in small clubs on the Strip and nursing an arena size midlife crisis.
"Don't you ever think of being 50 or 60, hauling our gear around, passing out fliers, fighting with the bookers and still sweating the rent?" she asks bandmate Faith (Lori Petty).
It's a dilemma most bar band veterans have to face sooner or later although no one wants to think about it.
Although the plot occasionally strays into melodramatic made-for-cable movie territory the dialogue has the rueful ring of actual experience. In fact, novice screenwriter Cheri Lovedog toughed it out on the LA club scene for over a decade with her own all girl punk rock band, opening for bands like Jane's Addiction, Hole and L7. There is a lot of smoke, sweat and tears in lines like " So I'm a 40 year old woman chasing a teenage dream. But you know what? It all comes down to this. These 40 or 50 minutes of playing live a few times a month." Gershon is a naturally charismatic performer and she's firing on all cylinders here. The star did all her own vocals live. This kind of hard, angry, lyrically charged rock is deceptively difficult but Gershon has the vocal moxie as well as the looks and the attitude to pull it off. (To prepare for the role she took guitar lessons from Joan Jett and played clubs with a backup band.) Lovedog wrote the songs and although not all of them work, "Every Six Minutes", a snarled warning to would-be rapists, is chillingly convincing. Musician/filmmaker Alex Steyermark lenses the proceedings like a gritty reality TV doc. "It was really important for me to capture the culture of what it is like to be in a band," he tells us on the DVD. "This is a world I'm familiar with, a world I come from and in many ways I wanted to pay homage to that, to the people who really work hard at their art even though they are never going to see any kind of material success from it."
"I was this dorky 7th grader when I had my first real cool experience. Ike and Tina Turner at the Hollywood Bowl. Suddenly the idea of becoming a teacher or a nurse lost its edge. Sorry, Mom."
According to Jacki, watching punk icons X at the Whiskey A Go Go on LA's Sunset Strip was a pivotal experience
"I left that show knowing I had to have my own band. So I got an electric guitar, learned three chords and conned some chicks into starting a band with me."
Twenty years later Jacki is still toiling away in small clubs on the Strip and nursing an arena size midlife crisis.
"Don't you ever think of being 50 or 60, hauling our gear around, passing out fliers, fighting with the bookers and still sweating the rent?" she asks bandmate Faith (Lori Petty).
It's a dilemma most bar band veterans have to face sooner or later although no one wants to think about it.
Although the plot occasionally strays into melodramatic made-for-cable movie territory the dialogue has the rueful ring of actual experience. In fact, novice screenwriter Cheri Lovedog toughed it out on the LA club scene for over a decade with her own all girl punk rock band, opening for bands like Jane's Addiction, Hole and L7. There is a lot of smoke, sweat and tears in lines like " So I'm a 40 year old woman chasing a teenage dream. But you know what? It all comes down to this. These 40 or 50 minutes of playing live a few times a month." Gershon is a naturally charismatic performer and she's firing on all cylinders here. The star did all her own vocals live. This kind of hard, angry, lyrically charged rock is deceptively difficult but Gershon has the vocal moxie as well as the looks and the attitude to pull it off. (To prepare for the role she took guitar lessons from Joan Jett and played clubs with a backup band.) Lovedog wrote the songs and although not all of them work, "Every Six Minutes", a snarled warning to would-be rapists, is chillingly convincing. Musician/filmmaker Alex Steyermark lenses the proceedings like a gritty reality TV doc. "It was really important for me to capture the culture of what it is like to be in a band," he tells us on the DVD. "This is a world I'm familiar with, a world I come from and in many ways I wanted to pay homage to that, to the people who really work hard at their art even though they are never going to see any kind of material success from it."