Before it disappears for all eternity, like the third remix on an Ariana Grande EP, let me take a moment to roundly deplore the EDM fantasy “We Are Your Friends”. A Zac Efron vehicle, he plays Cole Carter (no really, it says it here), a college dropout on the fringes of the LA DJ circuit, who grabs the interest of hotshot DJ James Reed (Wes Bentley -you know the Hunger Games guy), who is about to give him his big break at the Sunrise Festival, when Zac nails his girl (“Blurred Lines” Emily Ratajkowski -who I thought was a lot cuter than she actually is with her top on) and gets caught.
Along with this storyline, is a Saturday Night Fever featuring three best friends, on a trajectory nearly exactly like SNF including the wee buddy dying. counter story. Why? To kill time.
It all ends up at the festival where, in a preposterous and annoyingly stupid concept, the two DJs are concerned that true EDM comes from found sounds, and so Zac finds some and wows the crowd. Complete nonsense and if writer and director Max Joseph sat and spoke to Diplo, for, I dunno, 15 seconds, he’d have realized the folly in this piece of nonsense. EDM as music is about manipulating music into hooks, as Diplo recently did with a Justin Bieber vocal.
“We Are Your Friends” knows about as much about EDM as “Trainwreck” knows about being a freelance write. Nothing. And while some of the protools manipulation scenes are fun, and from time to time it gets at the pleasures of the drop the bass, particular at a mid movie rave and the behind Zac’s shot from behind DJ set, it isn’t enough to sustain this extended piece of bullshit. You wanna know what it’s like to be a DJ? Watch the first scene with Dr. Dre in it from “Straight Outta Compton”, where he is lying on the floor listening to vinyl with headphones on, that’s the truth.
Grade: C