On the Road

Blurring fact and fiction, this dramatised documentary skips between a travelogue of rock band Wolf Alice as they tour the UK, and a fanciful dramatic subplot in which a naive young record company executive (Leah Harvey) discovers how life is lived at the music biz coalface. Director Michael Winterbottom punctuates the frequent banality of jobbing musicians touting their wares from town to town with an only intermittently engaging tale of a greenhorn thrust into a lion's den of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. On stage, Wolf Alice (led by the infinitely lens-friendly Ellie Rowsell) are undeniably charismatic, and a straight concert movie would be a grand thing, but they are unfairly portrayed as mundane individuals when caught on camera in the long hours travelling between live shows. The dramatic elements seem awkwardly soldered on to the narrative, as if the director couldn't make up his mind what sort of film to make, and opted to have his cake and eat it, without ever really savouring either experience.