We Are the Best! is, to put it bluntly, the best.
At first it sounds like a movie you’ve seen before: three teen outcasts form a punk band and find friendship and solace in music and in each other. But nothing will prepare you for the exuberance, the quirky charm, or the outright joy of this film by Swedish director Lucas Moodyson. Set in Stockholm in 1982, it’s less a story about rock than it is a love letter to the sweet aimlessness of youth.
Bobo and Klara are best friends, 13-year-old punk enthusiasts in a world that doesn’t understand them. At school, they’re mocked by boys and girls for their weird haircuts and clothes and their seeming indifference to looking stereotypically girly; at home, Klara’s life is a chaos of noisy parents and siblings, while Bobo lives with a sad divorced mom who cycles through boyfriends and doesn’t have time for her daughter. Their only real comfort is each other—that, and Swedish punk music.
Of course, the conventions of the rock film dictate that these two misfits must eventually start a band—but the way they come to that decision demonstrates the film’s sly, effortless way of turning cliches on their heads. At first, Bobo and Klara just want to shut up Iron Fist—a metal band consisting of mean older boys with long hair—by stealing their rehearsal space at the local youth center. They’re lying about having a band, of course, but once they’re inside the rehearsal room they start pounding at the drums, yelling into the microphone, and just like that they’re a punk band.
Soon, they add a third girl to their ranks: Hedvig, a quiet loner who gets booed at the school talent show as she’s trying to play classical guitar. Hedvig is a Christian and a total square, but Bobo and Klara, recognizing her talent and, perhaps, a kindred spirit, ask her to join their band. Hedvig brings something important to the group—namely, actual musical talent, which Bobo and Klara don’t have much to speak of.
Then again, the music might be beside the point. The girls have only one song in their repertoire; it’s called “Hate the Sport” and pretends to be political even though it’s really about how much all of them hate gym. (Lyric sample: “People die and scream / but all you care about is your high-jump team. / Children in Africa are dying / but you’re all about balls flying.”) The scenes of the girls getting progressively better at this one song are enjoyable, but they’re hardly the best or most memorable of the film. Where the picture’s real heart lies is in the delicious freedom of youth, in its sweet and stultifying aimlessness: the three girls making a nuisance of themselves on a train, jamming at home with Klara’s dad on the clarinet, giggling over boys, or giving Hedvig an awful punk haircut with a pair of dull scissors in the bathroom.
The film’s key insight is about a strange and vulnerable time in childhood—that thin cusp of time at age 12 or 13 when you’re no longer a kid but not quite a teen, when you’re still young enough to be silly but old enough to be interested in boys. There’s poignancy, for instance, in the fact that while Klara and Hedvig are starting to look like young women, Bobo’s still got the face and cheeks of a baby, and is painfully conscious of the fact that while boys have started to notice her friends, they can’t seem to see her as anything other than a freak with weird hair and glasses.
These flashes of darkness—boys, parents, school, bullying—threaten to overwhelm the girls at times. Ultimately, though, the irrepressible joy they find in being together is the greater force. Being a kid is both glorious and terrifying, and when you’re in middle school the most daring thing of all is to just be happy anyway, to be with your friends and just be yourself, defiantly declaring to the world, “We are the best!”
That’s pretty punk.
