By Lori Acken, www.channelguidemag.com
Since the mid ’90s, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger had mulled a feature film that would delve deep into what he knew best: the gritty reality of the music business and the characters who made it crackle and hum.
Eventually he took the idea to his friend, movie-industry legend Martin Scorsese, a master of blending music and cinema into intensely affecting experiences. Scorsese’s “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” collaborator Terence Winter came aboard in 2007 and, a year later, delivered a tentative script to Paramount Pictures. Then the stock market crashed — and with it, studios’ interest in making grand-scale films. Finally, the trio reimagined the story as a weekly series and brought it to HBO.
The fruits of that patience and partnership are unveiled when “Vinyl,” the group’s love letter to the cultural kaleidoscope that was 1970s New York premieres Sunday. Burnishing its pedigree with a cast of tested actors clearly in their element (you’ve never seen Ray Romano or Andrew Dice Clay like this) and exciting newcomers, “Vinyl” is a visual and auditory feast with an achingly human story at its core.
Olivia Wilde and Bobby Cannavale dazzle as Devon and Richie Finestra. A lifelong music aficionado who wears his heart on his sleeve, Richie is founder and chief of American Century Records, a company suffering rock ‘n’ roll’s assault on its bubblegum roster even as Richie adds younger talent-spotters to his payroll. Haunted by a lost friendship and addictions he barely holds at bay, Richie’s solace is suburban family life with Devon, a former Andy Warhol intimate. “Devon and Richie got sober together, and they’re both sober within this world — this debauchery,” Wilde explained during a recent phone interview. “It is revealed through flashbacks why they have to be so careful about their sobriety together. When Richie breaks that promise, their entire world falls off its axis.”
“What attracted me to the show in the first place is that it’s all very much high-stakes,” Cannavale added during an HBO event at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “Everything that’s happening in the show — Richie’s circumstances, the circumstances of the record label — is very desperate. Same thing with this relationship. They’re everything to each other.”
Wilde says that Jagger, Scorsese and Winter (who haunted famed punk rock incubator CBGB as a Brooklyn-born teen) committed themselves to showing an unvarnished New York City circa 1973. “It was much grittier. It was much more dangerous,” she says. “It was something that can only be told honestly from the perspective of people who actually lived it.”
It shouldn’t surprise, then, that concert sequences are each a tour de force, shot with a dreamlike intimacy that lets the viewer climb both into the room and inside Richie’s mind as he revels in the sensations that drive him most. “That’s who this guy is — his entire reason for being, in his mind,” says Cannavale. “It’s the music. He is connected to the music in a very visceral way and on a very primal level.”
Cannavale gets it. “I have music on all day long — much the way Marty was discussing how the soundtrack to Richie’s life, this sort of internal soundtrack, is what he wanted to convey,” he smiles. “I don’t usually like to talk a lot about what I bring from my own life into it, but I do think about music pretty much all day every day.”
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