A brother and sister must choose whether to pursue their dream of touring with their band or support their family and stay in Cleveland, Ohio.
Director: Paul Schrader
Stars: Michael J. Fox, Gena Rowlands, Joan Jett.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093415/
Watched online, ok print.
19 songs in the Soundtracks.
This is in the midst of MF's Family Ties (TV Series, '82-9), between Back to the Future ('85) and Back to the Future Part II ('89).
I was forewarned by 2.2k+ IMDb raters' 5.5 average. But Schrader's name raised an eyebrow: he wrote Taxi Driver ('76), Raging Bull ('80), Last Temptation of Christ ('88), all directed by Scorsese. Well, he has writing credit on 4 films with worse ratings than this. In fact, 9 of his 23 films have rating 6.2 and under.
This felt like a Lifetime channel film, except I've never watched them, so I shouldn't say that. It was about the family problems, which seemed only to be that mom (GR) was overbearing to JJ, but not to MF. But then she got forgetful, and diagnosed with cancer. Then she died. JJ caused all sorts of problems before that, and sort of reconciled moments before the death, then ran off. But she joined MF onstage for the final scene.
We got some scenes of the band performing, and JJ is pretty good, but extremely unpleasant, enough that I really wanted to turn it off.
I suppose it's not quite drivel, but close. Avoid.
HBO & more, distr. TriStar, dir. Schrader; 5
