Critics reviews

Chase impressively sustains a tricky tone of loving criticism: Not Fade Away is romantic and quite beautiful (the filmmaker has a superb ear for music, which will be of no surprise to Sopranos fans), but it's also gently despairing.

It would be selling Not Fade Away short to call it a sort-of Sopranos prequel, just as it would be selling youth short to call it an incubator for adulthood. Like youth itself, Not Fade Away can be insensitive; it can be crude in its formulations; at times its priorities can seem misplaced. It's also a reminder that despite all that, or maybe because of it, teenagedom can be worth remembering, and even re-living.

If Not Fade Away seems intentionally minor and formulaic, something like a David Chase B side, it is energized by a shrewd wistfulness that honors both the nastiness and absurdity of the era. It's especially smart about the way that generational clashes, and the tragedy they sometimes inspired, were born from a joint fear and confusion over shifting tides no one quite understood how to handle.

Every scene plays with an in-the-moment vividness far removed from nostalgia-laden sentimentality; even the simplest interaction feels like it echoes through eternity. But it isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

The offbeat dramatic rhythms and open-ended exchanges that the writer-director employed so beautifully in his landmark HBO series are put to good use here, especially in a Buñuelian set piece that finds our hero wandering dazed and confused on the Sunset Strip. That Chase felt the need to literalize his thesis with a surreal dance sequence near the end is a shame, but the abundance of grace notes everywhere else is more than enough to compensate for the discordant fade-out.

The result is a kind of pure filmmaking in the guise of a familiar object, a gleeful disregard for expectations in order to transmit to the audience sensations of the time, the music, the language, the clothing, and the way youthful hormones have a transformative effect on reality not unlike psychotropic drugs: enhanced, more vivid, and hyperreal.

At its best, Not Fade Away is successful at evoking a palpable atmosphere of thrilling possibility among its characters, all trying not only to discover themselves, but also to find ways to negotiate practical realities while trying to make their voices heard in the world.

Not Fade Away is essentially a loose national-through-the-personal rundown of the sixties, and as such its overarching narrative feels distinctly secondhand. In short, it's something like a greatest-hits record—engineered to please the crowd, but as a whole somehow unsatisfying, lacking the texture of a less overstuffed long-player.