We Are the Best!

For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.

We Are the Best! is the story of Bobo, Klara and their unlikely soul mate Hedvig. It’s about their assertion of individuality and how punk is their salvation. The follow-up to Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s internationally-inclined Mammoth, it doesn’t feature bankable leads like Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams or an exotic Thailand setting. It returns him to the familiar backdrop of his own country.

It also transports the director back to his earliest and more congenial films Show me Love and Together. We Are the Best! (Vi är bäst!) does not have the darkness or edginess of the bleak Lilya 4-Ever and the grim A Hole in My Heart. Moodysson is resetting the dial to when his outlook was sunnier and less concerned with exploitation and the underbelly (pictured right: Liv LeMoyne's Hedvig before her punk makeover).

The film draws from Moodysson's wife Coco’s 2008 graphic novel Never Goodnight (Aldrig Godnatt), a fictionalised account of her own teenage years. We Are the Best! centres on the moody, bespectacled and almost pseudonymous Bobo (Mira Barkhammer), a girl who sees no place for herself in the Stockholm of the early Eighties. Her friend, the more impetuous Klara (Mira Grosin), shares her feelings. They decide to form a band but can’t play and have no instruments. They do have a lot to get off their chests though. At a school concert, after a hilarious dance-troupe sequence to The Human League akin to Donnie Darko’s Sparkle Motion set piece, they see Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) perform with an acoustic guitar to cat calls. Like them, she’s an outsider. Openly Christian, she sits on her own at lunch. They ask her to join the band and then cut her long hair off.

It’s impossible not to root for the 12- and 13-year-old girls. The veneers they affect are easily scratched but they stick to their guns. All three leads are assured, terrifically likable and natural. Moodysson's film appears free of artifice. The unlikely trio unite against Iron Fist, their youth centre’s metal band, contend with sexism, test their limits with drink, become conflicted over who is keenest on members of well-known punk band Sabotage and triumph by sparking chaos at an out-of-town concert after which they conclude that “we are the best.”

Some local touches don’t detract from this being a universal story of teenagers finding their way. Sabotage's home Solna, just beyond Stockholm’s metropolitan limits, is employed as a metaphor for grittiness as it was in the Swedish original of Let the Right One In (the underpasses are the same in both films). The girls are derided as city slickers before their climatic appearance on stage in Västerås, west of Stockholm. The soundtrack of Swedish-language punk classics by Ebba Grön and KSMB is thrilling (pictured left: the girls encounter Sabotage for the first time).

As well as contending with the idea that punk is old hat, being female and playing music is an issue. It actually was in apparently egalitarian Sweden: a Rock Against Sexism concert of all-female bands was held in Stockholm in 1980.  A fantastic vignette summing up how Sweden saw itself comes when an older couple chide the girls for begging for money in the subway to buy a guitar. “We don' t do that in this society,” they are told.

We Are the Best! is warm. It makes its points about Sweden gently. And it is lovely to see Moodyssson exhibiting a cheerfulness missing from his work for almost 15 years. But it is a thin film which hinges on the charisma of its leads. Fortunately, their enthusiasm carries it along.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for We Are the Best!