We Are Your Friends
1.5 Waffles!

Zac Efron stars as Cole Carter – a young millennial trying to make it in this crazy, topsy turvy, messed up world of ours. He dreams of becoming the planet’s greatest DJ, and he feels all it will take is one, amazing, mind blowing track to make everyone pay attention and dance!

Along the way, he starts to be mentored by a legendary DJ (Wes Bentley), finds himself hopelessly attracted to that mentor’s girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski), and wonders what happened to the bond between him and his entourage of pals as each one needs to choose the path he will follow in life. Writer/director Max Joseph wants to capture the angst of a generation, much like Saturday Night Fever and many others before it, but lacks the depth needed to be a classic.

We Are Your Friends is OK, but delivering pretty visuals trumps the need for development and true emotion, and that includes the actors.

While it would be easy to ridicule model and wannabe actress Ratajkowski, she doesn’t stink. She just doesn’t add anything special or stand out for anything more than the obvious visual reasons. A better director might have been able to elicit more personality out of her, but Joseph only captures flashes of it on the screen, and thinks the rest of us will be so enamored with her pouty lips to forgive the lack of anything better.

Then, Efron has the same problem of only shining occasionally. He’s able to better capture the range of emotions Cole feels, but the script doesn’t give him enough. Mostly, Efron is left to look befuddled at the confusing world around him (and provide his own obvious visual reasons in the meaningless, exploitive scene of him in the shower).

At times, Joseph is able to capture the struggle of working class kids fighting and hustling to make their way through a world where selling out might give you some creature comforts. Joseph and co-writer Meaghan Oppenheimer even have the audacity to make you wonder if those comforts are worth the price of your soul, which was a surprising and refreshing question to be raised in a world where we seem to have replaced a pursuit of morality with the worship of the almighty dollar.

However, We Are Your Friends is an emotionally flat movie with a cliché ending.

We Are Your Friends is rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexual content and some nudity.