Kids Rock

Rockin' the mike: Music teacher Paul Green teaches young C.J. how to channel his inner guitar god in the documentary film Rock School. Courtesy Odeon Films.

In the winning new film Rock School, 12-year-old guitar prodigy C.J., short and shy enough to pass for nine, is so adroit on a fretboard that he slays the toughest crowd of all: a days-long Frank Zappa festival in a German town where the main park actually contains a Zappa statue. One can only assume Zappa is not taken lightly by the Teutonic set.

Preceded by Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, Rock School is the latest in a rash of precocious-kid documentaries. Kids are the new animals of the doc world: cute, photogenic, always doing the darnedest things. But these films also bump up against our own conflicted attitudes towards children today; in other words, these docs are really about adults. After C.J.’s killer solo, Paul Green, a portly failed musician and successful megalomaniac who is C.J.’s teacher at the Paul Green School of Rock in Philadelphia, stands centre stage, too. Notably, he bows deeper than his student, and more often.

Rock School echoes the 2003 Oscar-nominated Spellbound, a film about eight children from across America competing in the National Spelling Bee. The recent Mad Hot Ballroom follows miniature ballroom dancers from New York public schools as they break out their best foxtrots and tangos in cutthroat competition. The formula is this: a small group of kids is pushed to greatness on a public stage by heretofore untapped internal forces (that’s the feel-good part that makes the films so charming) and also aggressive, competitive grown-ups (the less-discussed feel-bad part).

Open up and say argghhh!: Young rock scholars pose with their attention-seeking teacher, the titular founder of the Paul Green School of Rock. Courtesy Odeon.

All of these movies feature a band of misfits behaving like they’re on Our Gang: “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” As with the Little Rascals, the entertainment value lies in how well the kids of Rock School imitate grown-ups, and they are quite convincing. There’s Madi, a golden-voiced, would-be hippie who sings folk songs exactly like Sheryl Crow; twin nine-year-old boys Asa and Tucker who compensate for lack of talent with impressive rock-god strutting and a stage mom who gels a mean mohawk; and Will, a slouchy, articulate depressive who knows that he is hanging around the school solely for company. Their fearful leader is Green, who declares that he once wanted to be a rock star, but only if he could be a rock star in 1972. He schools his youngsters in the ways of Judas Priest, Santana and Pink Floyd. Contemporary, in this guy’s oeuvre, is Billy Idol.

Green is an extreme version of the typical hard-assed “inspirational teacher/coach” figure who pops up in any number of fictional variations on To Sir, With Love. (Recently: Coach Carter. This week: Rebound. Soon: Bad News Bears.) Movie teachers are tough yet loving, hard yet soft, growling on the outside while laughing on the inside. But Green is only snuggly in comparison to a rabid ferret. While his staff works on the actual music with the kids, he mostly screams. Green describes Will as a “a piss-poor musician.” He belittles Madi’s taste in music until she drops out of her Amish rap group (led by Grand Master Friendly). Kidding, hopefully, he uses the motivating phrase: “You mess up once and I’ll f---ing punch your face in.” At one point, Green decries the whole “self-esteem” movement that grips pedagogy these days, saying, “The whole thing is not to compare kids, but I do.” He is stunningly horrible, but the children thrive under his tutelage (mostly; Will is cruelly cast out), laughing off Green’s histrionics and digging their first exposure to grown-man madness.

For films that are ostensibly about kids, adults take up a lot of space in precocious-kid docs. Many of the little Spellbound spellers are first-generation Americans, and their parents spur them on with cue cards and drills. Parents don’t appear much in Mad Hot Ballroom, but one teacher pushes ferociously on their behalf. Dominican-American herself, she drives her Dominican students as if waltzing is the only way out of their rough Washington Heights neighbourhood.

With immigrant-makes-good undercurrents, there is something acutely American about these films: the kids are not just in the process of becoming adults, but of becoming good citizens. (When Canada does precocious, like Talk 16, the great 1991 documentary about four very different teen girls, the kids are more tortured and the conclusions more ambiguous, but cuteness is still central.) Child prodigies are society’s ultimate strivers, fully realizing their God-given individual greatness.

But greatness, with its adjacent finger-pointing towards failure, is not a word a lot of kids hear these days. A recent piece in USA Today listed the ways in which educators treat children as fragile: bans on games of tag and dodge ball; the National American PTA recommending that Tug of War be referred to as Tug of Peace; teachers who are admonished to mark papers in a “calming colour” like lavender because red pens are too “harsh.” A friend of mine who teaches at a Toronto private school has been told to avoid using the word “lazy” when describing the behaviour of students who are (help me, thesaurus) idle, slothful or indolent.

Mad skillz: Students Wilson and Jatnna strut their stuff in Mad Hot Ballroom. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

Yet while today’s kids are coddled, they’re also fetishized for behaving like adults; when the barely pubescent dancers of Mad Hot Ballroom dropped their sexiest moves at a screening I attended, the audience breathed a giant awww. Kids are rewarded for looking, dressing and especially consuming like grown-ups, and a multibillion-dollar advertising industry tells them how to do so. In her 1999 book Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future — And Ours, American writer Kay S. Hymowitz mourns the end of “republican childhood.” She argues that from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, young people were encouraged to play freely, like kids should, and adults were discouraged from corporal punishment, like adults should be, but everyone assumed that children required the moral and intellectual guidance of their elders. In the past 30 years, thinking around childrearing has shifted to regard kids as self-sufficient machines, fully rational and able to dictate their own wants and needs, even as it pertains to their intellect. Inspirational teachers and pushy parents aren’t needed anymore. A lavender pen is.

The good intentions that inform the self-esteem movement may be backfiring. A much-discussed paper published in Scientific American last December asserts that self-esteem building has little to do with academic success or preventing bad behaviour in young people. In fact, other studies have shown that falsely boosting self-esteem can actually be bad for kids, turning them into egomaniacs and crippling their ability to identify with others. Perhaps the recent spate of precocious-kid documentaries connect with audiences because they reject the assumption that kids are essentially in need of protection. At last, these little spellers, dancers and rockers get cheers for being good at something. Their self-esteem is earned, not assumed. Sehr gut, C.J.! Sehr gut!

Rock School opens in Toronto July 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.