Films portray musical milieu with varying realism

The road winds up from Sunset Boulevard, a series of sunbaked hairpin curves carved into the southern flank of the Hollywood Hills. It crests at Mullholland Drive and then suddenly falls over the other side of the mountain, twisting down to the flats of the San Fernando Valley. Laurel Canyon, the street, is a 7-mile stretch of asphalt that connects Hollywood and Studio City. Laurel Canyon, the place, is something else entirely: a languid warren of low-slung bungalows and backyard studios where Southern California's rock subculture -- from Carole King to Marilyn Manson -- has bloomed for 40 years.

"Laurel Canyon," the movie, is the film world's latest effort to capture the LA rock 'n' roll ethos on celluloid. Written and directed by Los Angeles native Lisa Cholodenko, a reluctant valley girl who started hanging out in the canyon in her late teens, "Laurel Canyon" gets a lot of things right -- especially the look and feel of the place. A rusted-out 280Z belonging to an almost-gifted musician. The jungly swimming pool that separates a record producer's crash pad from the 24-track console in the converted guesthouse. Therapeutic wheat-grass shakes in the morning. Late-night listening parties at the Chateau Marmont. A communal bong.

Stories that transcend those iconic images, and characters that are true to the scene's spirit, have proven more elusive for filmmakers. And that's ironic, because it's hard to imagine more natural bedfellows than movies, rock culture, and the California dream -- all of which seem to have materialized from the same wellspring of fantasy and desire.

Cholodenko's got her finger on the pulse of the canyon, at least in terms of its popular image as an arty, hedonistic playground. This is one of the few places on earth where "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" isn't a deviant lifestyle but a casual, comfortable norm, and the question of how we deal with the moral ambiguities of our primal urges is at the heart of "Laurel Canyon."

Frances McDormand is Jane, a freewheeling 40-something music producer whose strait-laced son Sam (Christian Bale) brings his prim fiance, Alex (Kate Beckinsale), for an extended stay at her canyon home, where Jane's younger rock star boyfriend and his band are finishing up an album. Lifestyles collide, a mess of eroticism ensues, big questions go unanswered, and records get made -- a fair representation any way you look at it.

But it's luminous, talented Jane, locus for all musical and human connections, who embodies the canyon's sensuous glow. When Cholodenko explains during a phone conversation that the character and the film itself were inspired by Joni Mitchell's "Ladies of the Canyon" -- a song on an album by a musician who helped shape the canyon's identity -- one has to marvel at the enduring power of the mystique.

"That album, with the water color on the cover, was such a love letter to Laurel Canyon," says Cholodenko, who rediscovered the album while editing her film "High Art" in 1998. "I started with that sketch of a cigarette-smoking woman who's modern but embodies the '70s music culture. She parties hard, loves the one she's with, and sees nothing wrong with it. That's the romanticized aesthetic. Then she bumps up against her offspring, a Reagan-era kid."

The bumping up is an important element of the genre, if films such as "Almost Famous," "The Banger Sisters," "Sugar Town," "The Doors," and the 1976 rock-biz version of "A Star Is Born" can be lumped into one category. The offbeat, adventurous rhythms of the music world move in complicated counterpoint with the measured beats of the real world, and the question filmmakers have to grapple with is whether nonconformity translates to sterling inspiration or wholesale misery. Or both.

What distinguishes indie films such as "Laurel Canyon" and Allison Anders and Kurt Voss's "Sugar Town" from the lion's share of the big-budget features is Hollywood's inclination -- and that of the mainstream movie audience, for that matter -- to find its way to a moral center, or at least a lesson well learned.

"The Banger Sisters," for example, is a two-hour pitch for moderation. Susan Sarandon's Lavinia, a former LA rock groupie turned conservative suburban mom, gets back in touch with her inner wild child. Goldie Hawn's Suzette, the rock groupie who never grew up, discovers the comforts of family and stability. The end.

Oliver Stone's "The Doors" is an anachronism. While a riveting work of faux memorabilia that sports a tour de force performance from Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, the film is complicated by Stone's most thoroughly rock 'n' roll trait -- hero worship. But then the auteur responds to his own adoring portrait of the artist by simultaneously and systematically dismantling the mythical object of his affection.

As usual, Stone's film is mostly about Stone's personal psychodrama. And come to think of it, that's pretty rock 'n' roll, too. More to the point, the man knows his way around an acid trip, and watching Kilmer's transformation from beautiful junkie-genius to hostile, bloated basket case is like experiencing it from the inside out.

Former rock journalist Cameron Crowe's autobiographical "Almost Famous" (which, oddly enough, featured McDormand as Jane's alter-ego: the overprotective mother of a music-obsessed son) finds a middle ground with great warmth and little sentimentality. The excesses of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle aren't glamorized or demonized in "Almost Famous" but portrayed as a whole lot of joyful, scummy fun. And who should know better than Crowe, who's both optimistic and realistic. In the end there's a mother-and-child reunion and a self-centered rock star gains a measure of self-awareness -- enough hope to please the filmmaker and the studio suits -- but there are no pat resolutions.

It's the absence of a black-and-white value system, the embrace of ambiguity, that's at the heart of the rock world and every good movie about it. The best moment in "Laurel Canyon" is the closing one. In its utter lack of clarity, it feels more like a start than a finish.

"You can be mindful and emotionally responsible, but in a certain way you don't have control over what things are going to impose themselves from the outside," says Cholodenko of the movie's ending. "You don't have control over where desire is going to come from and when and how you're going to respond to it."

For a truly unpretentious dose of SoCal rock reality, though, nothing quite approaches the amusing, depressing little indie "Sugar Town." How real is it? Michael Des Barre of Power Station, Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet, and Duran Duran's John Taylor play over-the-hill rockers. There are no success stories and no record deals, but there are plenty of bad demo tapes. Everyone is either a has-been or a wannabe. All are in varying states of desperation. As ramshackle and sketchy as the characters' lives, "Sugar Town" takes on the desire for fame and treats it like an infection -- one that spreads unchecked through the streets of Los Angeles.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 3/28/2003.