Air Guitar Nation: Faking it

Strumming his life with his fingers ...

An imitation that only serves to highlight the essential absurdity of the original, air guitar celebrates the extreme pelvis-grinding showmanship, noodly legwork and provocatively wagging tongues of stadium cock rock.

??
Air guitar is camp, performance art, and in the documentary Air Guitar Nation, it is also exceedingly hilarious. That so explicit a teenage masturbatory ritual is performed in public is, simply, giggle-inducing, though air guitar is also taken as seriously as Scripture by its devotees.

??
Air Guitar Nation is an infectiously goofy frolic through the outer reaches of nerddom where geeky restaurant managers, tech consultants, audio engineers and government budget analysts let their inner freak flag fly in what is essentially a drag performance of extreme forms of rocker machismo. Set up as a kind of cowboy movie showdown, Alexandra Lipsitz’s film follows two U.S. Air Guitar competitors (a Yank spin-off of the original Finland competition).

??
Björn Türoque (né Dan Crane) is the lean and lanky garage/punk band underdog. His competitor is C-Diddy (aka David Jung), a prep-school grad and actor whose Korean parents always hoped he’d go into medicine or law. Now they must satisfy themselves with the sight of all their Exeter tuition money flowing down the drain and a son whose shtick is a face of rubber and a Hello Kitty breastplate worn above a jelly-donut belly, rocking out with an invisible guitar.

??
Air Guitar Nation plumbs a bit into the family backgrounds of its players, but mostly follows Björn and C-Diddy to the national competition in Los Angeles and then to the air-guitar motherland of Oulu, Finland – home to an international contingent of earnest air-strummers.

??
The documentary is both a ludicrous parody of manly guitar rock at times reminiscent of one of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries and a preening dude (and occasional chick) paradise very much like real rock ‘n’ roll debauchery with its meta-groupies, conviviality and beer-drinking fun.

??
By the final night of the Finnish contest, there is so much dude love in the air and such a spirit of international good will, you could cut it with an air knife. It may be invisible, but you can definitely feel it and it rocks.

??
Air Guitar Nation, 4 stars. Directed by Alexandra Lipsitz. Rated R. Opens Fri., May 11. At the Plaza Theatre.