The movie that inspired Joe Keery’s music career: “I felt a magnetic pull”
In the lottery of life, you can generally hope to be one of three things: good-looking, talented or rich. Any one of those should see you on the path to happy times. But occasionally people land on all three, like Joe Keery from Stranger Things, and they end up as TV stars, or rock stars or in his case, both, while the rest of us seethe quietly and think, ‘Yep, that makes sense.’
With ‘The Upside Down’ currently being everyone’s second favourite place to hang out due to the almost unprecedented hype around the fifth season of the Duffer Brothers’ sci-fi horror hit landing on Netflix this month, Keery’s is a name on a lot of lips, not just as someone running from demagorgons but also as ‘DJO’, his musician alter-ego and releaser of viral tunes like ‘End of the Beginning’.
Keery was a theatre student in Chicago originally and graduated in 2014, appearing in the occasional TV advert and then landing a part in a debut movie the following year with the indie drama Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party. As we discussed earlier, life goes differently when you’re on easy mode, and Keery was duly cast on Stranger Things that same year, about 12 months after graduating.
Over the next few years, he became one of the leading cast members, in addition to appearing in shows like Fargo and movies including the excellent Jessica Chastain gambling drama Molly’s Game and the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy.
But all the while in the background, Keery was doing his music, and when you hear about his formative years pretending he was in a certain Jack Black classic movie, then the career mash-up of rock and the big screen makes sense.
He was an avid fan of School of Rock, the 2006 story of Jack Black’s unemployed loser who pretends to be a music teacher to earn some spare cash and ends up taking his students all the way to the final of a Battle of the Bands. Kerr says: “I felt a magnetic pull to be a part of something like that, so a friend and I started playing music together.”
Now, Kerr’s tastes can’t really be faulted here, because School of Rock is a genuinely fantastic bit of filmmaking, managing to combine being laugh-out-loud funny with one of the finest soundtracks in history. And that’s before we get to the astonishing central performance from Black, who has you pulling for him from minute one despite not really being a great human for most of the opening few scenes.
He really gets into his stride once he hits the elementary school, though, of course, a blur of ramshackle post-drinking mess and a lightning-infused, uncontainable passion for electric guitar music. It is the living embodiment of telling someone “you HAVE to hear this song”, and the fact that he is doing it to a set of bored posh kids who couldn’t care less makes it even funnier.
Directed by Richard Linklater, who has made a hell of a lot of good films, it is a mark of just how good School of Rock is that it stands up there with one of his very best, and it spawned a successful Broadway musical as well as a real-life music school.
Keery, meanwhile, will follow Stranger Things up with next year’s Liam Neeson movie Cold Storage about a former bio-terrorism agent trying to control an escaped fungus.
