High Fidelity at 20: As compelling as ever with one of Cusack's best performances

In fairness, Rob is the one doing the telling here, and he’s played by John Cusack, the affable goof of “Savage” Steve Holland comedies like Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, and the ingratiating underachiever of Say Anything …, which had established him as a tender romantic soul about a decade earlier. When Cusack was cast as the lead in High Fidelity, it was hard notto think of him as a grownup version of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything … – just as aimless and uncertain about the future, but coarsened by failed relationships and the grinding inertia ofhisprofessional life. The film version of High Fidelity has a strange, magical alchemy working for it: an American adaptation of a British novel, written by Americans (Cusack and his writing partners DV DeVincentis and Steve Pink, and Scott Rosenberg) and directed by a Briton (Stephen Frears), with the location shifted from London to the north side of Chicago. The opening narration is potent: “Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousandsofsongsabout heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. His first call to the mother of his grade-school make-out partner is a light preview of the petty narcissism to come – he wants her to knowthat he was“technically” her daughter’s first boyfriend, not the boy she would eventually marry – but it gets darker in a hurry. When Rob catches up to that high-school girlfriend (Joelle Carter), the one who’d resisted his advances, he triggers the longstanding trauma of their breakup, which led to a sexual encounter with another boy she didn’t want (“it wasn’t rape because I said, ‘OK,’ but it wasn’t far off”) and put her off relationships through college. In retrospect, High Fidelity was a sneakily dark kick-off to a decade where arrested development was the primary theme of comedies about white guys who didn’t have it together. But Frears’ film does have the same arctoward maturity, compromise and a healthy adult relationship, and it also has the goofy friend types, Barry (Jack Black) and Dick (Todd Louiso), Rob’s comrades in musical snobbery.

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