“teen spirit” movie review

What I love most about reality TV singing shows like American Idol, The Voice and America’s Got Talent are the stories.

Sure, it’s a joy to witness breakthrough talent and listen to gifted singers but it’s their background stories that get me every time.

So I was really interested to see Teen Spirit, in which Elle Fanning plays 17-year-old Violet, an aspiring singer who lives with her Polish immigrant mother (Agnieszka Grochowska) on a farm on the Isle of Wight. Violet is withdrawn and miserable about her life – except when she’s singing.

She performs at dingy bars where no one is really listening until one night when she befriends Vlad (Zlatko Buric), a retired opera singer who recognizes her talent and offers to be her manager when she asks him to chaperone her to the Teen Spirit singing competition, hiding the whole thing from her mom.

As she moves on in the competition, her world expands and she’s forced to grow up and make some tough choices.

Violet’s talent is apparent to everyone in the industry — and so is Elle Fanning’s. She does all her own singing in the movie, and she kills it.

The best decision first-time writer-director Max Minghella (who’s the son of the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and an actor in The Handmaid’s Tale) made was casting Fanning as Violet.

The story itself is nothing new, and it doesn’t go deep enough into Violet’s background to let us really get to know her. The only reason we care — and we do — is because of Fanning. She singlehandedly elevates the whole movie.

With a great pop soundtrack (song choice is key, as we’ve all learned after 17 seasons of American Idol), she channels her inner Annie Lennox, Ellie Goulding and Sigrid and lets it rip. Although the movie itself is nothing like Bradley Cooper’s Best Picture Oscar nominee, it’s easy to watch Fanning sing for her life and think, “A star is born.”