About the movie
High Fidelity
Rating: 
Cast:
Iben Hjejle; John Cusack; Jack Black; Sara Gilbert; Joan Cusack
Directed by:
Stephen Frears
READER FEEDBACK
Compulsive hit parades of music, lost loves
John Cusack hits the right notes as a self-absorbed-geek record-store owner.
Do sad love songs (and aren't most of them?) prompt the listener to become miserable, or do folks already swamped in misery turn to tunes about the brokenhearted in search of melancholy consolation?
That's one of the questions Rob Gordon ( John Cusack ) asks himself - and us - in High Fidelity, a dead-on funny, faithful adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel about an ambivalent, ambitionless record-store owner who is dumped by his girlfriend and is thus forced to make some decisions about his life: e.g., should he grow up (a bit) or remain in a state of prolonged, self-absorbed adolescence?
Transporting British scribe Hornby's book, and protagonist, from London to Chicago, director Stephen Frears' High Fidelity captures the world of music geekdom with deadpan accuracy: Championship Vinyl is an out-of-the-way record shop where Rob and his two employees, the big, boisterous Barry (Jack Black) and the nervously shy Dick (Todd Louiso), pass the long, customerless hours compiling lists (Top 5 records of all time, Top 5 songs to play at your funeral), and making snide comments about people's crappy taste in music. Their heads are oozing with arcane audio knowledge; they are obsessive, they are compulsive, they are snobs.
And they are capable of relating - no, compelled to relate - their disaster-strewn lives with the words and melodies etched in the grooves of the black vinyl (and picture discs) they so maniacally hoard. Rob, in fact, having just been jettisoned by the smart, beautiful Laura (Danish actress Iben Hjejle - pronounced: EE-ben YIGH-la, impress your friends!), has rearranged his extensive record collection not alphabetically, nor by category, but chronologically - the Elvis Costello album he bought at the time he was going out with . . . and so on.
Cusack, who addresses the camera (a device that takes a little getting used to) and quotes big chunks of verbatim Hornby in the process, cuts just the right figure here: a 30ish brooder whose narcissism isn't exactly likable, but whose ready acknowledgment of his flaws and woeful self-centeredness is. However pathetically it may come across, the guy is trying to better himself. Thinking that by examining his past rejections he'll come to an understanding about his present one, Rob flashes back on the Top 5 breakups in his own sorry history, allowing us to meet a wacked-out Lili Taylor, a bitter, beautiful Joelle Carter, and an amusingly sultry Catherine Zeta-Jones.
High Fidelity - which was scripted by Cusack and his Grosse Point Blank writing team of D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink (along with a credit to Scott Rosenberg) - is buoyed along by an artfully apt soundtrack (everything from Thirteenth Floor Elevators to the Velvet Underground, Stiff Little Fingers to Stereolab, Queen to Katrina and the Waves), and some playful cameo turns by the likes of Tim Robbins (as a ponytailed New Age-aphorism-spouting hipster), Natasha Gregson Wagner (a rock journalist) and Bruce Springsteen (as himself, offering advice for the lovelorn). Deploying a meteorological metaphor, Frears films Cusack walking around Chicago's cinegenic precincts in the wet and rain: The weather outside is frightful, just like the weather inside his head.
High Fidelity, with its knowing take on men, messed-up romance and music, is like one long, hook-filled pop song for the eyes.
today's 
