Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Dir: Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer

2016

***

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a pretty good attempt at satirizing the modern day music industry but it is no This is Spinal Tap. That said, nothing ever will be, This is Spinal Tap was the first great 'mockumentary', other subjects have been covered since but none of them, especially not music ones, have been as successful. However, the music business has changed dramatically since then and the band in question here are a very different beast. It is written by and stars Akiva Schaffer, Any Samberg and Jorma Taccone, also known as The Lonely Island. The comedy trio have been writing comedy for many years and were hired by Saturday Night Live in 2005. From there, they made several comedy songs including 'Dick in a Box', Jizz in my Pants' and 'I Just Had Sex’, which had a huge impact on the internet. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is pretty much a film version of the fictional band they've been performing as with slight changes that the viewer can attribute to certain performers that are currently active. There are also plenty of performers who are happy to appear and send themselves up, saving the comedians the job and looking good in the process. It was what I expected it to be if I'm being honest, predictable and a bit of a one trick pony but it also broke away from many expected clichés and saved all the shocking moments for when you least expect them. It's not really my kind of humour but I've always found it tough not to laugh at The Lonely Island's previous projects and a follow up to the criminally underrated Hot Rod has been long overdue. It is crude in places but I thought it was remarkably universal considering all of its naughty bits. Maybe the line between serious acts and comedy is thinner than it was, satire often struggles to compete with our media, governments, art and culture these days, maybe this 'mockumentary' is so successful because it's pretty much the truth, indeed, watching certain reality TV shows makes Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping look like a straight up documentary. The subject aside, the film works (and is funny) because the writing is so good. Not only that, because it is the writers who perform their own jokes, they have the integral understanding of it, and the three old friends bounce off each other perfectly. Sometimes it is enough just watching friends messing around together. 'Mocumentaries' certainly aren't an easy thing to get right but The Lonely Island trio have all the right ingredients to make this work, I'd like them to do something else non-music related, not necessarily without music but something with a totally different theme. They've written for so many other comedians it's time they concentrated on themselves. It was a Box office bomb but they were just unlucky, it certainly didn't deserve to be.