Adventures of Power

Directed by Ari Gold

At AMC Village 7

Runtime: 88 min.

Adventures of Power has all the elements of those sneering indie quirkfests that feign sympathy for its outsider characters but really just wants to document their loserdom with smug detachment. Gangly, eccentrically-dressed hero? Check. Weirdly fetishized lower-middle-class milieu? Yep. Stern but caring blue-collar parent? You betcha. And to top it off, it’s a movie about air-drum players! Strike up the 1980s-era synthesizers, sit back and let the deluded antics begin!

Gag me. And indeed, the first half of Adventures of Power’s slim 89-minute running time, writer-director-star Ari Gold gives you exactly what you expect. Power (Gold), the air drummer in question, has just gotten himself fired from the copper-mining site where his labor-leader father (Michael McKean) is organizing a strike against the management. Directionless and misunderstood in his small New Mexico town, Power begins a journey that eventually takes him to Newark, NJ, where he falls in with a rag-tag team of air-drummers led by the stern Carlos (Steven Williams). As the group prepares for an epic air-drum contest in New York City against preening pop-country drum star Dallas (Adrian Grenier), Power finds himself drawn to Annie (Shoshannah Stern), the deaf daughter of a rock-and-roll hating Christian evangelist.

Gold’s twitchy visual style lends itself the material’s cheap laughs a little too well. There isn’t an already-obvious joke he isn’t willing to underline with ironic music cues or parodic slow-motion. As Adventures of Power approaches its big-show finale, though, Gold explores the slightly-more-sincere possibilities of his kitsch sensibility, with pleasant results. A montage intercutting the air-drummers’ training with a clash between copper workers and strike-breakers (set to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”) derives an unexpected vigor from Collins’ propulsive pop energy and Gold’s unapologetic visual flash.

And for all the cheap shots in Gold’s script, Adventures of Power views air-drumming with a surprising affection. There’s some real camp ebullience in some of these sequences—particularly the climatic air-drumming battle—and this enthusiasm seeps into Gold’s filmmaking as well. It makes one wonder what would happen if he let this over-the-top energy run loose through a whole movie, rather than undercutting it with a smirk.