From Freshman auditions to Senior graduation, Alan Parker chaperones one entire class through New York City's prestigious High School of the Performing Arts. Parker's own lack of discipline, or lack of form, allows the students to carom at random among the conventions of the coming-of-age movie and the aspiring-artist movie, and not necessarily the best of both worlds (the peephole into the girls' locker room, the fake-French fake-filmmaker who promises stardom in return for blouse-removal). An impromptu musical number in the school lunchroom, half an hour into the movie, is such a sudden and severe break with reality that the movie would never have time enough to repair the damage, even if, half an hour later, there were not another one almost as bad that takes place in the streets and on the cartops outside the school. Parker achieves a certain toehold in cinema history by documenting the midnight rites of the Rocky Horror Picture Show cult, but only the faithful will be satisfied with his easy acceptance of it as a means of Dionysiac liberation. Eddie Barth, Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
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