We Are the Best!

Dir: Lukas Moodysson

2013

*****

Lukas Moodysson had great success in the late 90s, early 00s with a string of hit films. Show Me Love, Together and Lilya-4-Ever were three very different film but each was a masterpiece. 2004's A Hole in My Heart was powerful, it pushed down boundaries and came close to crossing them but as brilliant and as important as it was, it was very hard to watch and even harder to enjoy. 2006's Container remains a bit of a mystery and his 2009 film Mammoth split audiences right down the middle. With We Are the Best!, a film adapted from the graphic novel Never Goodnight written by his wife Coco Moodysson, the Swedish director has once again found the secret of success and has created another brilliant film. There is nothing I didn't adore about We Are the Best!, the story of two young teenagers living in 1983 called Bobo and Klara who are ostracized by their peers because of their love and devotion to punk. After seeing a school rock band perform, the girls immediately think they can do better and set about learning how to play, until they realize they need help. They spot a quiet and subdued girl at school who also seems ostracized due to her Christian beliefs and her shyness. Once they see her perform an amazing classical guitar solo at the school talent show, they set about recruiting her for their band and transform her, slowly, into a follow punk. What I really love about the film, apart from the brilliant three lead actors, is the fact that it understands punk. Punk isn't all safety-pins and coloured mohicans, it's a way of thinking and not at all about the anarchy that your parents were scared of. In this respect it feels very authentic, even though the girls are young, had just missed the punk hay-day and just liked the music, they are the embodiment of what the movement was really like and essentially what it was about, and that includes that fact that they didn't come from particularly hard up families. Without wanting to sound condescending, Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne are adorably sweet in their performances and they make me want a punk daughter. Their journey from punk fans into a punk band is funny, tender and totally believable, I suspect the girls - apart from LeMoyne, learned while filming but the song they come up with is actually quite good. It is my favourite punk film by a long way and one of the best alternative feel-good films in modern cinema. There is a difference between loving something and adoring it, with We Are the Best! I adore everything about it and want to see what happens next with the girls. Moodysson should definitely leave it here but a big part of me would love to see the characters go through the late 80s, 90s and 00s together. One of the top films of 2013.