We Are The Best! – Film Review

In We Are The Best!, Swedish director/screenwriter Lukas Moodysson’s delivers a must-see for anybody who is thirteen, anybody who has ever been thirteen and anybody for whom music has had a profound affect on their life and their friendships. That’s you, by the way.

Teenage years are tough. Especially for those who don’t fit in with the cool kids, and this adaptation of Moodysson’s wife’s graphic novel deals with this issue in a warm, observant, funny and touching way. The story tells of three young misfits growing up in early ’80s Stockholm. Mohawk-sporting pixie Klara (played by the dazzlingly charismatic Mira Grosin) and her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) are well-meaning rebels looking for a cause. They find it one day when, despite having no instruments or musical talent, they form a band (after all, since when did having no talent stop bands forming?). They write a song “Hate The Sport” about their PE teacher and recruit their religious, shy, classical guitar-playing schoolmate Hedvig (played by Liv LeMoyne, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Lea Seydoux). She teaches them to play and they drag her kicking and screaming out of her shell. And lo, an all-girl punk band is born.

We Are The Best! is unapologetically affectionate in its tone. At times it is laugh-out-loud funny, elsewhere cringeworthy in its accurate portrayal of young teenagers discovering who they are. You can pretty much tick off moments from your own youth while watching it. It’ll make you want to be thirteen again, which is an astonishing achievement in itself.

It’s hard to praise this beautiful, heartwarming movie too highly. If you choose not to see it, you are a fool. If you see it and don’t connect with it, then quite simply you have no heart and no soul. We Are The Best! stamps its feet and yells at the top of its voice that it’s okay to be different. No, that being different is THE BEST.

We Are The Best! is in cinemas September 18.

Review by Bobby Townsend