15 Music Movies That Aren't Musicals - Recommended by Karsten Runquist
Musicals are great. But some of us prefer to get our melodic fix through a separate subgenre called “music movies”, non-musical movies that either are about or use a lot of music. These movies celebrate the collaboration of the two mediums; either using music as a tool to guide the film, or using cinema to explore a certain genre or movement. From School of Rock to Gaspar Noé’s Climax, there’s something for everyone in the music movie genre.
In 1973, 15-year-old William Miller's unabashed love of music and aspiration to become a rock journalist lands him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to interview and tour with the up-and-coming band, Stillwater.
In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, gifted but volatile folk musician Llewyn Davis struggles with money, relationships, and his uncertain future.
Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.
Almost a decade since larger-than-life glam-rock enigma Brian Slade disappeared from public eye, an investigative journalist is on assignment to uncover the truth behind his former idol.
Fired from his band and hard up for cash, guitarist and vocalist Dewey Finn finagles his way into a job as a fifth-grade substitute teacher at a private school, where he secretly begins teaching his straight-A students the finer points of rock 'n' roll and the power of sticking it to the man. But as the school’s stern principal closes in and the Battle of the Bands looms, Dewey risks everything to prove that rock 'n' roll can change lives.
The intersecting stories of twenty-four characters—from country star to wannabe to reporter to waitress—connect to the music business in Nashville, Tennessee.
Josie, Melody and Val are three small-town girl musicians determined to take their rock band out of their garage and straight to the top, while remaining true to their look, style and sound. They get a record deal which brings fame and fortune but soon realize they are pawns of two people who want to control the youth of America. They must clear their names, even if it means losing fame and fortune.
The employees of an independent music store learn about each other as they try to stop the store from being absorbed by a large chain.
When a dance troupe is lured to an empty school, a bowl of drug-laced sangria causes their jubilant rehearsal to descend into a dark and explosive nightmare as they try to survive the night—and find who's responsible—before it's too late.
Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
