Take a self-proclaimed teen rocker with ample talent and borderline personality disorder, add 25 years and a case of male-pattern baldness, and you’ve got Paul Green. Rock School is the brilliant and agonizing—if hilarious—story of Paul, a self-proclaimed guitar god who never “made it” but didn’t give up, instead searching for the back door to stardom with the nimble fingers of a few genius kids. If he sounds a little like Jack Black’s fictional character in School of Rock… well, he’s considered suing Paramount.
This rudely honest documentary follows Paul, a gifted teacher but emotionally stunted Peter Pan, through music lessons and rock shows, as he chases fame, assaults emotionally frail teenagers, offends parents, divides communities and cusses up a storm. Paul is relentless and pathetic in his crusade, forcing his students closer and closer toward that holy grail of rock, the orchestral perfection of Frank Zappa’s “Inca Roads.”
Willfully objective, Rock School catches a complicated man in a seemingly simple lens, and catches everything.