Bandslam

There’s a hint of Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything and a dash of Some Kind of Wonderful in this surprisingly endearing tween flick about a music nerd (Connell) who finds a niche at his new school when a popular girl (Michalka) decides to make him the manager of her band. Why he can’t see that he belongs with Hudgens’s quirky Sa5m (“The 5 is silent”) is a mystery. The female leads are kinda plastic, but Connell is refreshingly normal, and Graff knows how to sell a fantasy of high school that has a little more heft than High School Musical.

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