Paul Schrader runs his cultural vacuum cleaner over the rock-and-roll scene -- not at the Billboard Top 100 level, but at the bottom-rung bar scene in Cleveland and environs: fly-by-night bands with names like the Barbusters, the Hunzz, Yogurt Moon (shades of Spinal Tap! -- one of whose members, Michael McKean, turns up here as a member of the Barbusters). Schrader's dust-bag collects plenty of evidence of what drives modern youth into the arms of rock: parents, the mounted fish on the downstairs wall, religious literature on the coffee table, saying grace before meals, having to work for a living on an assembly line (turning out Charles-and-Diana TV trays), and so on. Michael J. Fox is a bit too milquetoast-y to hold his own next to so authentic a rocker as Joan Jett (they're a brother-sister act, and a father and mother to her illegitimate son), and the movie has no pace, and really no place to go, despite the cross-generational rapprochement at a hospital deathbed. But it looks right and feels right, and one thing follows another, and nothing -- not even the business at the deathbed -- quite prepares us for the bold stroke of sentimentality, guaranteed effective, still to come: the new widower synchronizing watches with his dead wife in her coffin. Yasujiro Ozu, one of Schrader's early idols, would have been proud. With Gena Rowlands and Jason Miller. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd