Teen movie with something extra: social pretentiousness. Happy Harry Hard-On is the handle of a basement radio broadcaster unbeknownst to his parents upstairs, a pair of laissez-faire liberals who've not forgotten the lessons of the Sixties. By day, he's a painfully shy, slouching, monosyllabic nonentity at Hubert H. Humphrey High School (this in Barry Goldwater's home state!). But at ten p.m., at 92 on the FM dial, he blossoms into the silver-tongued Voice of Teenage Nihilism ("Doesn't this life of blindness and blandness make you want to do something crazy?"), sending out subversive pop songs (Leonard Cohen et al.), snappy catch-phrases ("Talk hard!" "So be it!"), and psychological counsel to the lonely and the lovelorn. In no time -- in fact by the time the movie begins -- he has become a cult hero something like the demented newsman of Network, but cross-pollinated with healthy doses of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and George Carlin from one angle, and Zorro, Spartacus, and the Scarlet Pimpernel from another. This split personality might have made a viable working model for the woolly-brained and inarticulate adolescent who nonetheless feels himself in possession of, or on the very verge of, previously undiscovered truths. But it does not make a viable model of a grassroots teenage Messiah. (Nor does so slavishly derivative and Nicholson-worshipping an actor as Christian Slater make a viable model of free thought and individuality.) And writer-director Allan Moyle undermines any such viability by his naked desire to extend the cultishness beyond the cast of characters and into the moviegoing public at large: imagine, if you will, bumper stickers saying "Talk hard," T-shirts saying "So be it." (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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