Word: quadrophenia
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...QUADROPHENIA...
...Quadrophenia is a resourceful and frequently successful attempt to recapture the feelings, textures and chaos of that period. Unfortunately, the film is saddled with a title that belies its ambitions...
Though produced by the rock group The Who and named after one of their albums, Quadrophenia is not a concert film. The band members do not appear in the movie as performers but turn up only in the background score and occasional still photographs. Rather than make a safe companion piece to the film version of Tommy, The Who have daringly cross-fertilized American Graffiti with Look Back in Anger...
Like John Osborne's Angry Young Man of the '50s, the hero of Quadrophenia is named Jimmy. Estranged from his family and bored with his London mailroom job, he has become a member of the mods, a loose, nationwide gang of motorbike dandies that sprang up with the Mersey sound. As the talented director Franc Roddam follows Jimmy and his cronies around, we watch a society being born. When The Who's pivotal song. My Generation, flips on at a boozy make-out party, the kids forsake their '50s dance steps for the tribal free...
...Daniels also has two funny and touching sex scenes. When Jimmy masturbates solemnly at home and later makes inexperienced love to a prized "bird" (Leslie Ash), the film persuasively demonstrates that even the revolutions of the '60s did not overturn the crucial rituals of postadolescence. In those moments, Quadrophenia offers not only historical drama but also the kind of human drama that is timeless. -Frank Rich