Empire Records

Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger

Allan Moyle's Empire Records, from 1995, is an unsuccessful teen flick centered around an independent record store. Carol Heikknen's script is strewn with cliches, though, in fairness to her, Warner Brothers lopped off a half hour of footage and some additional supporting characters in order to shorten the film to a more marketable 90 minutes. The teenaged employees learn that their beloved store is about to be sold to a franchise and react by doing exactly what Mickey and Judy did years ago: they put on a show. Moyle, best known for the cult film Pump Up the Volume, does help the youthful cast project a vibe of communal synergy that makes the predictable proceedings move along pleasantly. Unfortunately, the dire commercial fate of the picture crippled Moyle's career in Hollywood.      

Part of the reason for the failure of the movie is the extremely uneven quality of the youthful cast. The females fare better with a quartet that was sprinkled with stardust: Liv Tyler, Debi Mazar, Renee Zellweger, and, best of all here, Robin Tunney. The male juveniles have fared worse since Empire Records, though most still work steadily in the biz. Generally, the males come off as more obnoxious than charismatic. Anthony LaPaglia was top-billed and he is a fine grounding presence as the store's fatherly manager. An overly bronzed Maxwell Caulfield is a hoot as a fading and rancid teen idol: sort of a combination of Bobby Sherman, Richard Marx, and Robbie Nevil.

Another of the problems with Empire Records is its lack of engagement with actual music. The grunge era had ended and no new wave had arisen to supplant it. In retrospect, rock was in decline and, despite  a brief spurt of millennial era retro rock (The White Stripes, The Strokes), the record charts would soon be dominated by Hip-Hop and American Idol style pop or amalgams of the two. The Empire Records soundtrack is dominated by anonymous jangle rock provided by groups that are forgotten today and deservedly so: The Martinis, The Innocence Mission, Drill, Lustre, Ape Hangers. The discourses about music that enlivened 2000's High Fidelity are largely absent. An exception is an entertaining debate about the relative merits of Primus versus The Misfits, which is buried under the closing credits.

One of the ironies of Empire Records is that today, in 2024, it is the chain record stores (like Tower and Sam Goody) that have disappeared after the rise of Amazon and other online retailers while the independent Mom and Pop stores are tenaciously hanging on. As a habitue of those stores, I wanted to like Empire Records more than I was able to. Don't blink and you will be able to enjoy brief glimpses of Gwar and a young Tobey Maguire.