Dewey's problems begin the day he is fired by his band and threatened with eviction by Patty (Sarah Silverman), the bossy shrew who has taken over the life of his nerdy roommate, Ned (White). When Ned, who has given up rock 'n' roll to work as a substitute teacher, receives an emergency cry for help from the Horace Green School, Dewey happens to take the call and impulsively impersonates his roommate to apply for the job.
The mousy school principal who hires him, Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack), is a model of nervous rectitude behind whose spectacles flashes a tiny glint of rebellion. But as it turns out, two sips of beer are all it takes to unleash Rosalie's inner Stevie Nicks.
Dewey's master plan is to mold the students into a self-contained rock band, and to carry it off he dreams up a role for every fifth grader. Those who are not musicians design lights, costumes and sound, or serve as roadies. Under Dewey's impassioned tutelage it takes only a few plugged-in twangs for the lead guitarist, Zack (Joey Gaydos Jr.), to catch the spirit; and when the geeky keyboardist, Lawrence (Robert Tsai), finds a groove, he stops feeling like a hopeless outsider.
Tomika (Maryam Hassan), a shy backup singer, begins to blossom the moment she discovers her inner Aretha. The students are adorable, with just enough backbone to keep from melting into icky Hollywood moppets.
Rehearsals take place during school hours while a lookout monitors a surveillance camera that spots approaching school officials. When one appears the class switches into a ludicrous pretense of earnest historical discussion. The project culminates in a Battle of the Bands that has all the hoopla of a Rocky prizefight.
School of Rock doesn't try to convince us that any of this is real or even remotely possible. A shaggy loudmouth like Dewey could never talk his way into a substitute teaching job. The molding of a fifth-grade class into a well-oiled rock machine in a few weeks is also inconceivable, as is the notion that it could be done in secret under the principal's nose.
Arriving at a moment when hip hop has superseded rock as the dominant commercial music, School of Rock feels a little deja vu. School of Rock is really a comic postscript to the rock revolution. A 21st-century Rock Around the Clock, it longs for the combative spirit of those good old days before Beethoven decided to roll over and tell Tchaikovsky the news.
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