U.S. Premiere!

They say all-girl-rock-band movies are a specialist taste, but Nobuhiro Yamashita is here to prove them wrong. Yamashita (director of Hazy Life and No-one's Ark, both small classics of deadpan slacker comedy) starts from a plausible situation-a high-school band breaks up over “musical differences”-and gives it a wonderfully improbable twist. The band's cofounder Kei decides to cobble together a scratch band of her own to compete in the school's music competition, and recruits Korean exchange student Son (the incomparable Bae Du-Na, from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) as her new vocalist, unfazed by the fact that Son doesn't yet speak Japanese, let alone sing it. Armed with a score by ex–Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha and a guest appearance by “the Ramones,” Yamashita crosses the molehills of high-school rivalries with the mountains of punk belligerence to produce a joyously entertaining movie.