Svengali Review

Dixie is a Welsh postman-cum-music fanatic looking to make his big break in the capital, managing a band he’s found on YouTube called ‘The Premature Congratulations’. While the band members are young, arrogant, ungrateful and wasteful, Dixie is anything but. Working his fingers to the bone and with barely a penny to his name, he does all he can to get the band he’s had to persuade to let him manage into the annals of rock n’ roll history.

But of course, as is the music industry’s wont, the bigger the band gets, the less control Dixie has over them. Wild parties and arguments cause rifts between not only the band members but also Dixie and his ever-suffering significant other, Michelle. The usual pitfalls of the underdog narrative befall Dixie in his attempts to make it big, and the plot is hardly anything new for the most part, but SVENGALI’s charm will win you over where its originality might not.

Owen in particular is a delight, encapsulating all that’s endearing about SVENGALI’s otherwise perfect script, developed from a television movie of the same name. The dialogue leaps off the page (or screen), with an absolutely potent mix of humour, smarts and seriousness. Meanwhile, the rock and roll soundtrack is perhaps the best British compilation to hit the silver screen in any film, a feat achieved largely by Owen himself, persuading such iconic artists as The Who’s Pete Townshend and The Stone Roses to lend tracks to the film.

And SVENGALI doesn’t just sound great. It looks it, too. Hardwick fills his frames with everything that makes Britain great, somehow managing to mostly avoid the doom and gloom weather that besmirches old Blighty for 99% of the year. Instead, the gloriously sun-kissed city streets of London juxtapose rolling Welsh hills beautifully, immersing us further in Dixie’s transition to the big smoke.

SVENGALI is 93 minutes of pure fun, and while there’s not much here to surprise, there’s plenty to enjoy – watch out for Martin Freeman playing up the height of music pretension as record store-owner, Don. Jonny Owen’s writing debut encapsulates all that it means to be British, placing it in the context of a music scene that doesn’t exclude non-genre fans, instead enjoying universal appeal with a charming underdog tale that will make you fall in love with Britain all over again.

[usr=4] SVENGALI is released in UK cinemas on Friday 21st March, 2014.