Writers: Mike Gilbert and Josh O’Connor
Director: Julia Jackman
Julia Jackson makes her directorial debut at the London Film Festival with her music-based rom com Bonus Track designed around an album of songs set in 2006 with a concept by Josh Oconnor who provides a brief cameo. This schoolboy tale of popularity, sexual experimentation and angsty coming-of-age may have a sweet boy-meets-boy narrative but the overt shyness of lead character George and some distracting side narratives doesn’t bring anything new to the genre.
George dreams of Performing in the Year 11 talent contest but his music teacher Mr Zeppelin is scathing about George’s lack of talent and derides him in front of the class. Struggling academically across the board, George meets new boy Max whose celebrity musician parents make him the target of the popular kids and a local journalist. A friendship forms as they work on George’s song, but they soon discover that something more is being composed as well.
Bonus Track has lots of unrealised potential, setting itself the challenge of creating musical themes for each of its eight chapters plus a ‘bonus track’ while simultaneously developing the narrative in chronological order. This concept album of a film works fairly well in that respect, selecting a relevant song to reflect the emotional and plot-based changes happening to George. With a soundtrack including Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus and Dry Your Eyes by The Streets, the theoretical frame of Jackson’s movie is certainly well conceived.
Less effective is the creation of character and story that fills out each situation. The character of George (Joe Anders) is largely passive for most of the film’s 100-minute running time, accepting everything life throws at him and waiting for Max to make the first move – in fact Max makes almost every move. This may be a realistic depiction of a powerless teenage boy, but George’s lack of agency or even conversations makes it hard to see what he and Max (Samuel Paul Small) ultimately have in common. Max too is a bit of a cliché, effortlessly cool, determined to put in the time however rude or strangely George behaves, a true rom com prince there to the rescue the hero but with little beneath the surface.
A number of ill-chosen subplots add little to the purpose of Bonus Track and exist to give the better-known adult actors something else to do. Jack Davenport gets the best of it with a father story playing to the actor’s grumpy and sarcastic strengths but a twist about his marriage goes nowhere while his wife Julia (Alison Sudol) barely exists as an independent character. Likewise, Susan Wokoma has a number of scenes as George’s concerned Head of Year but never gets to develop her own lovelorn story strand that fails to acknowledges the range of the actor.
Bonus Track eventually does all the things you expect it to do through the talent show and traditional genre ending, but this high concept album could have been so much more.
Bonus Track is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
