Not Fade Away: Critic Reviews

Rock & roll is here to stay. And David Chase gets some well-deserved satisfaction.

By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, "Not Fade Away" offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.

Well-observed but occasionally disjointed, it's a film that's more about thematic tone, sound and images than it is driven by plot.

Aiming for a generational statement that encompasses the entire '60s experience, [Chase] turns unexpectedly inept.

It's a small gem with a killer rock soundtrack, well worth seeking out amid all the awards-season Sturm und Drang.

Chase ... allows nostalgic feeling to be the sole reason for this, his first feature film.

This film could have been -- should have been, even -- something special. But it's not.

This may color my enthusiasm somewhat. Still, I like to think I was mostly taken in by the wonderful cast and Chase's fond and generous evocation of another time, another place.

The movie is a psalm to those who, far from pursuing the path of the Rolling Stones, stayed trapped under a rock.

Somewhat autobiographical and worth seeing despite its somewhat muffled quality ...

The period details are spot-on and the soundtrack is great.

Mostly, Not Fade Away is a hit.

Yes, it's about rock and New Jersey, but it's also about getting a life going and dreaming, and that's timeless, classic stuff.

There are plenty of laughs along with the melodrama as the band and its members struggle through young adulthood.

Not Fade Away injects the past with the nervous energy and exciting uncertainty of the present, devoid of nostalgia or biopic baggage, and infused with all the wicked wit that characterized Chase's The Sopranos.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

Chase takes a basement view of the birth of America's '60s rock revolution with his big-screen debut Not Fade Away.

Feels like a three-part miniseries shoehorned into one nearly-two-hour morsel - there's too much going on in it for anything to have much weight.

...reaches for a grand statement about the period's intergenerational tensions and instead simply channels nostalgia.

Ultimately a disappointment - this is a movie easy to watch and even easier to forget.

In his first feature, David Chase returns to the New Jersey suburbs to cast a bittersweet glance back at the rock-fueled restlessness of the Sixties.

If you weren't in a failed band yourself, you know people who were, and Chase's story IS their story, if not in the particulars, then in the spirit and the passion. The music may fade, but what's behind it never does.

Painful, and not in a good way.

Chase offers a gritty, graceful salute to rock & roll in his ardent, acutely observed debut that makes him, at 67, a filmmaker to watch.

Despite the nostalgia-drenched idealism coursing through it - and a cinematic familiarity to the subject matter - this is not a story that's neatly told or safely predictable.