Daisy Jones & the Six Review: Riley Keough leads a rock soap opera

Adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“The Disaster Artist”) from the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, “Daisy Jones & the Six” is a soap opera wrapped in a historical backstage musical. Set largely in the 1970s, the novel is rendered as oral history, the story of the slow, then meteoric rise and sudden demise of a rock band. The 10-episode series, which premieres Friday on Amazon Prime Video, reflects this with a documentary frame — meaning the plot is interspersed with scenes of characters answering an interviewer 20 years in the future (late 90s, which saves the production tries to age the characters half a century too late).

With a real soundtrack, the book loses something in translation, as multiple narrators’ points of view are largely fused into one simple story. Reid’s approach also means there isn’t much dialogue on the page, so the adaptation is mostly a matter of extrapolation and expansion, with changes and additions to make it more conventionally dramatic – more like a television series. And as a TV series it’s fine, in a paradoxically underpowered, powerful way, though it runs a bit long and requires a deliberate suspension of disbelief.

Riley Keough plays Daisy, a poor little rich girl from the Hollywood Hills who we first meet as a teenager on the Sunset Strip in the late 1960s and who gets into trouble more implicitly than shown. Later, she starts writing her innermost thoughts into lyrics and converts her lyrics into songs. (It even “felt better than drugs,” future Daisy recalls.)

Meanwhile, working-class Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) is lured to a Pittsburgh suburb to join his younger brother Graham’s (Will Harrison) garage band. They play proms and parties and local bars until a chance encounter with an LA-based tour manager (a witty and witty Timothy Olyphant as Rod) gives them the idea of ​​moving to California with Billy’s girlfriend Camila (Camila Morrone).

A celebrity record producer, Teddy Price (Tom Wright), who is independently impressed with Daisy and Billy’s band, puts them together, against Billy’s wishes. But a hit single makes it inevitable that she joins The Six, and things go back and forth and diverge and become a mess from there.

The group that seems to have inspired Reid is Fleetwood Mac, which, with its fluctuating love affairs, various drug problems and control issues – the most soapy of many rock operas – was a romance/miniseries waiting to happen. There’s no attempt here to reproduce the group’s more subtle, mellow sound – the Six’s music tends towards bombastic – or their long and complicated history, except perhaps that it’s the story of a blues-based band gaining momentum , after A Californian Folkie was added. to the mixture.

There’s no one-on-one correspondence between the members either, though Keough, twirling around in her see-through stage outfit, channels a bit of Stevie Nicks, and Claflin is more or less in control of Lindsey Buckingham and Suki Waterhouse’s Karen. , like Christine McVie, is an English keyboard player. Still, I’d be very surprised if Keough and Claflin didn’t study the live video of Stevie and Lindsey watching Silver Springs.

The series expands on the role of Daisy’s girlfriend Simone (Nabiyah Be), who is described as a “disco pioneer” and primarily serves as a witness to Daisy’s misadventures in the book. Here she gets her own thread, including romance, while producer Teddy gets a little extra motivation – he’s on the cusp of success after several failures. (Her characters also bring some ethnic diversity to the show.) Camila, who is an important voice in the book but has little to do other than keep her marriage and family together, becomes a photographer here. And a short part of the novel set in Thailand turns into a long part set in Greece.

That Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” serves as the theme song for the series underscores the fact that it is primarily the story of Daisy and Camila, which focuses on women in music and the world and what they do and of them to be expected. (“I’m not the muse,” insists Daisy, whose beauty makes men want to own her. “I’m the someone.”) Underdog heroines, harassed and exploited despite being adored, the female characters and actors make a stronger impression than the man – especially Keough and Monroe, but also Waterhouse and Be in their minor roles.

While the music is, of course, a catch, providing an environment for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to run free, the series is nevertheless full of tropes well crafted in a century of showbiz drama – the tortured creator who uncompromising vision, the addiction cursed career, sexual attraction between creative partners, art versus commerce, art versus life.

Of course, part of the reason these tropes exist is that they’re true: countless episodes of “Behind the Music” have taught us that pop groups experience moments of dysfunction, to say the least. And as someone who’s had the chance to travel in a band, on vans and buses, I can tell you that even the best of friends can get on their nerves when they’re cooped up in a small space for weeks on end and the lead guitarist refuses. , turn off his amp or even step one foot out of the way. Most of the character types and incidents in “Daisy Jones,” whether outrageous or mundane, had their equivalents (and worse) in the real rock world, making the show itself feel underwhelming.

To blur the line between fiction and reality, two songs from the band’s album Aurora were pre-released on music streaming platforms.

It’s not a new game – The Monkees was designed in part as a machine to sell records, which would in turn promote the TV show. But the Monkees have also grown into a true contemporary hit band, continuing to record new music into 2018, while Daisy Jones & the Six are a generic retro pastiche whose music is cobbled together from sounds of 1970s folk rock, with the help by Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford and Jackson Browne.

The songs are catchy if you listen to them often enough, but it takes some imagination to accept the Six as “one of the greatest bands in the world” or invest in what we can imagine as the powerful chemistry between Billy , who is a bit on the pill, and Daisy, who is generally sunny despite her lack of impulse control and occasional drug use.

Whether you buy her as a rock goddess or not, Keough makes a strong impression as a headstrong free spirit. (Claflin is less good company simply because his character spends so much time upset or unhappy on the show.) There’s a tendency to make the music seem more important than funny – it’s a drama, so I suppose the drama takes precedence – but there are moments of real spirit there, perhaps most notably a group rendition of Ronnie Lane’s “Ooh La La,” which spotlights Karen van Waterhouse more than her bandmates ever do.

Oddly enough, when it comes to pop music, comedy tends to tell the story better than drama; which come across as clichés when taken directly as the satire to which the milieu is so eager to invite. An episode of Girls5eva tells you more about the music business than 10 episodes of Daisy Jones, and We Are Lady Parts is a better argument for why you want to be in a band. That Thing You Do shares more than a few plot points with Daisy Jones, with the benefit of not overstating the importance of the miracles. And “Spinal Tap” remains gospel among musicians – “puppetry” is an acronym that any performing player would understand.

Daisy Jones & the Six is ​​best thought of as a somewhat surprising romance all about music, an interpreted beach reading about big egos in love and hate, and ultimately about sobriety, family, and above all, fidelity.