Shakey Grounds/Gravitas Ventures
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Director: Michael Garcia
Starring: Eric Nelsen, Ella Cannon, Jonny Danks, and Kelly Thiebaud, with Eric Roberts and Mackenzie Ziegler
Language: English
Available: Apple TV+ and other streaming services
“We’re The Cuticles,” shouts Travis Dent, the band’s lead singer-guitarist, from the stage of a second-rate nightclub in a third-rate town. Moments later, he forgets the lyrics and chords to their opening song, trips over mic cables, lurches off the stage, and vomits, whisky bottle in hand, too boozed up to play.
Nothing new in wasted rockers wasting their talents. The list is long and sad: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Winehouse….
Cut to a rap artist who makes a televised Milli Vanilli-like confession that leads to the firing of A&R exec Nick Stone, played to perfection by Jonny Danks. Nick’s self-assurance as a talent-spotter is just a veneer, one that has been splintered by his termination and damaged reputation. Looking for a new job in New York is out of the question; Nick is now record-label poison.
A former colleague, who recently bought a house and property in Arkansas, takes pity on Nick and suggests that Nick go live in the sticks until things die down.
“Why would I go there?” asks Nick, horrified at the prospect. “That’s like the f—king edge of the world, dude!”
You guessed it. The record exec finds himself exiled in Bentonville, hometown of The Cuticles. The stage, literally and figuratively, is set for the band and “the suit” to meet cute.
Travis (an appealing Eric Nelsen, who bears a resemblance to the late drug-addled grunge rocker Kurt Cobain) may be a talented musician, but in life, he’s a loser. He earns pocket change working part-time flipping burgers at a food cart, while couch-surfing at the home of his recently widowed sister. Kelly Thiebaud, who plays Carrie, the put-upon sibling, brings to her role an emotional salad of frustration with and affection for her slacker brother.
A&R man Nick, cast away in the wilds of the Natural State (which sounds a lot better than Arkansas’ former nickname, the Toothpick State), stops by the Shakey Grounds coffeehouse, where The Cuticles’ manager, Mel (Ella Cannon), invites him to the band’s next gig. Nick notices the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction, and finds himself tapping his foot to the band’s energetic rock. Then it dawns on him: The Cuticles could be his redemption, his re-entry vehicle into the heady atmosphere of the big-city record biz.
Back in the Big Apple, a Cuticles’ demo tape that Nick submitted to his former label, Pacific Records, finds its way into the hands of his old coworker and bête noire, Brad Goldman, played with exquisite oiliness by David Lautman. If you were to shake hands with Brad, you’d be overcome with an urge to wash up with strong soap and very hot water. Demo in hand, sneaky Brad makes his way from the corporate offices of Pacific Records to Bentonville, armed with business cards, a too-slick smile, and an overly ambitious desire to sign The Cuticles out from under his archenemy, the disgraced Nick Stone.
At this point, don’t be surprised to find yourself drawn in more by the Nick-Brad rivalry than by the question of The Cuticles’ potential success. Partly that’s because we share Carrie’s apparent conclusion that her no-account guitarist-brother will never amount to anything because he doesn’t try. He doesn’t even seem passionate about his own music. If Travis doesn’t care about himself, how can we?
The exception to Travis’s dispassionate outlook on life is his fondness for his niece, Carrie’s teenage daughter, Lisa. Mackenzie Ziegler, the fresh-faced newcomer who plays Lisa, adds to one of the film’s most touching scenes when she lends Travis a keepsake given to her by her prematurely dead father in the hopes that it brings him luck at an upcoming gig.
There’s plenty to criticize about Shakey Grounds, depending on how picky you want to be. The clichéd characters are easy to name: Brad, the ruthless, vindictive exec; Carrie, the exploited sister (or friend, colleague, ex-school chum) supporting someone who won’t try to support himself; Mel, the unappreciated band manager who, in a will-they-won’t-they subplot that never really clicks, is secretly in love with Travis; and Nick, the city slicker who thinks he knows more than the backwoods rubes, only to discover that they’re the ones to teach him something.
As an amateur musician myself, I found some of the onstage music scenes especially painful when the actor-rockers clearly weren’t playing their own instruments. Their fingers didn’t jibe with what we were hearing. But Shakey Grounds is just one in an endless string of big-screen musicals in which the supposed musicians clearly weren’t playing their instruments. I’ve learned to live with it, reluctantly.
It isn’t until more than halfway into the film that we learn why Travis is always so depressed, drowning himself in liquor, anger, and self-loathing. The trouble is that the revelation (though it has been alluded to) isn’t completely convincing, seemingly tossed into the plot as a convenient late-hour explanation. The movie would have been better served, I think, if it had given the audience the rationale early on. At least we would have sympathized with Travis from the start.
But I don’t want to end the review on a downer. Shakey Grounds is a fun and enjoyable way to spend 82 minutes of your life. The cast is uniformly good. The shot-in-Arkansas scenes are germane to the plot, but I doubt they’ll cause a surge in tourism to the Toothpick… I mean, the Natural State.
I was surprised to learn that Shakey Grounds is the first feature film directed by Michael Garcia, previously known for his music videos. His sure hand with the pacing and his players shows a far more mature skill than might otherwise be expected.
Shakey Grounds is what I would call a “little movie.” The budget was small, the actors (except for a cameo by the always good Eric Roberts) largely unknown, and the story (by screenwriter Trace Slobotkin) modest in its aims. But if you’re a fan of rock ’n’ roll movies in general, or even films that are simply warmhearted with a hint of angst, you’d do well to put this one on your watchlist (but maybe not at the top of the list).
Author Bio:
Mark Orwoll writes about travel, film, and culture for Highbrow Magazine.
For Highbrow Magazine