It's been awhile since we've seen a film attempting to parse the world of the modern music business, especially the arenas of marketing and A&R. Nicholas Stoller's Get Him to the Greek did a pretty great job of spinning comedy out of the flustering job of handling pop music artists, and showed quite a lot of insight into matters of addiction, performance, and fame. That would seemingly be less of the case with Kill Your Friends, Owen Harris' feature debut, starring Nicholas Hoult as a sinister A&R man, hunting for a new hit amidst the fervor of Britpop. The film will be released in the UK on November 6th but hasn't secured stateside distribution, a fact that the latest trailer for the film would seemingly make an argument against.
Check out the new trailer for Kill Your Friends below:
One of the quotes in the trailer likens the film to a kind of American Psycho in the time of Britpop, and the similarities can be felt in the trailer, although there doesn't seem to be quite as much horror involved here. Rather, the film feels more like a take-off of Trainspotting's acerbic sense of humor and dog-eat-dog story arc, setting Hoult's wild man against fellow A&R toilers, most prominently played by Craig Roberts and Joseph Mawle, to find a new club hit. He's also seemingly at odds with James Corden's drug-addled Waters, and in a, er, close relationship with Georgia King's Rebecca. The trailer is tellingly soundtracked to a booming, pretty obnoxious cover of "Good Thing," one of a handful of hits produced by British pop sensation Fine Young Cannibals in the 1990s. The jazzy original song has seemingly been force-fed auditory steroids, turned from a slinky soul song to a club banger to reflect the presumable intensity of Hoult's quest to get a hungrily sought-after promotion. And hopefully, we'll get a chance to see how it all shakes out for him, depending on where the ebb-and-flow of international film distribution currently is.
