Record boss Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) senses his company is on the brink of bankruptcy due to poor sales and failing acts, but salivation may be at hand via a buy out from a German record company. However that might be the least of his problems...
This is a mishmash of fact, fiction, fable and myth and not a documentary. For a start The New York Dolls seem to be very popular (as if!) and punk rock seems to have happened years before it did. Fine, but Peter Grant supported Led Zep and didn't take second best for them. He got loud when he needed to, but he wasn't the bull-in-a-china-shop shown here.
(Don't get me started on the guy playing Robert Plant's accent!)
How many times do we want to hear the same stories/clichés about rock and roll? While I love it, you have to say it is a bit pathetic in print. Alexander The Great conquered the most of the known world by the time he was thirty, Keith Richards - meanwhile - had written Satisfaction and stuck lots of needles in his arms.
To return to the plot. Between the clichés Cannavale chews a lot of curtains about what is going to happen to others. The man has a heart - or is it more of a heart than the other sharks and pimps?
The central problem with flashback is that when the actor is already middle-aged you have to think he would be a pensioner by the time the seventies rolled around. Is Cannavale the best casting they could do? Corruption and creative accounting are popular in the entertainment industry, but few people in it are actually morons. The Germans would look at the books and know what they are buying. They might not be as good with hookers, coke and making rock, but they can read an account book.
In all pilots various cans of worms are opened hoping that the money (HBO) will be intrigued and see millage. Few of them are anything to do with music or entertainment, because the behind-the-scenes industry isn't really that sexy or that interesting. The product is - but the people behind it are just people with computers sitting behind desks. They may like a bit of blow - but who really cares?
