John Magaro and Bella Heathcoate (Paramount Vantage/Barry Wetcher)

Gene is a lead singer-guitarist getting ready for his stage debut. But fate has other plans, and Gene (Jack Huston) swallows a joint in the bathroom. Sure, they’re only playing in someone’s basement. But this is the 1960s, in New Jersey, and the specter of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are hovering in the dreams of would-be rock stars everywhere.

This is the stuff of Not Fade Away, the first feature film directed by David Chase, the television auteur behind The Sopranos. Chase grew up in the New Jersey suburbs with his own dreams of playing drums in a rock band, but his career took him elsewhere. This change in vocation makes Not Fade Away more than the standard-issue “Hey! Let’s form a band!” story you’ve seen many times before.

Music was an important part of The Sopranos, and Not Fade Away reunites Chase not only with James Gandolfini but with Steven Van Zandt, who serves as executive producer and music supervisor. For the movie to work at all, the music has to work, and between Chase, Little Steven and a cast that develops from rank to inspired amateur, it does.

But back to that basement debut. The lead singer incapacitated, the band starts to pack up, but what if the drummer can sing? Frequent moviegoers may recognize star John Magaro from an annoying pre-feature ad that ran in theaters a few years ago. Every time I saw that kid I wanted to smack that smug look off his face, and I wonder if central casting had that in mind. So I wasn’t inclined to like Doug, but that bad memory works to his favor. Doug climbs out from the shadow of the drum kit, and the plot of a hundred other movies is fulfilled. But Chase, and Magaro, make it sing. When Doug finds his voice, it comes completely unexpected. He doesn’t have great pipes, but his nasal, gravelly tone is a perfect 1960s garage band voice, soulful but limited, as unpolished as any Stones wanna be of the time and kind of reminiscent of the Standells.

James Gandolfini, Molly Price, and Meg Guzulescu (Paramount Vantage/Barry Wetcher)

The movie keenly lays down the eternal conundrum of white boys trying to play the blues. The Stones and Beatles and any number of 60s bands tried to find their voice through imitation (the movie’s title, after all, is from the Stones’ cover of a Buddy Holly tune).

Doug’s band follows a similar path of recreation and discovery. Finding one’s musical voice isn’t just a process of inspiration that emerges full-blown. It requires work from the most basic building blocks. These are laid out in a scene where Doug, pre-debut, leads his bandmates through the steps that go into a Bo Diddley shuffle. Doug ‘s very Italian father (Gandolfini), works for Pep Boys but even he knows the old saw that it takes more perspiration than inspiration to make art.

Not Fade Away is peppered with cultural references of the times: Opening on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Chase leads us through, the Civil Rights movement, early reactions to the Vietnam War and 1967’s “Summer of Love.” The Twilight Zone is a repeated touchstone, with Rod Serling, having such a hold on fanboy Doug (again mirroring Chase’s youth) that he seems to think Orson Welles stole from him. It doesn’t all work, but the music, and Magaro’s persona, evolving from geeky and awkward to charismatic and kind of obnoxious, carries the film. The movie ends on a seemingly incongruous note, an iconic 70s song covered lazily by punk legends. Such is what happens to even the most celebrated of musicians. A typical Hollywood movie about a struggling band would end with triumph, but like Chases’s signature television achievement, Not Fade Away ends on an ambiguous note. David Chase didn’t become a music star, but his rock and roll dreams never really dimmed.

***

Not Fade Away
Written and directed by David Chase
With John Magaro, James Gandolfini, Bella Heathcote, WIll Brill and Jack Huston.
Running time 112 minutes
Rated R for pervasive language, some drug use and sexual content, and getting kids to feel cool that they’re seeing what really should be rated PG-13.