It’s a story as old as time.

Ricky Nelson (Greogry Calpakis) is a star on his parents’s TV show but what he really wants to be is a rock and roll singer.  Ozzie (Jamey Sheridan) and Harriet Nelson (Sara Botsford) don’t know much about the strange rock and roll music but they do know that girls love it when Ricky plays the guitar and sings.  Ricky becomes a star and a teen idol but chafes at his parents’s attempts to control his music and his image.

This is another one of those behind-the-scenes entertainment biopics that were all the rage of television for a while.  This one was made for VH-1 instead of the any of the major networks and, as a result, it’s a little bit explicit in its depiction of Ricky’s sex life and his later drug use.  Ricky goes from being a teen idol to being a long-haired proto-hippie, getting booed by all the squares who only want to hear the oldies.  Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty shallow movie.  Ricky is played by Gregory Calpakis, who appears to be the same age of Jamey Sheridan, who plays his father.

Movies like this will never go out of style.  It’s inevitable that eventually, there will be biopics of Cobain, Bradley Nowell, Mac Miller, and all the rest.  They’ll be AI-generated which will make them seem even worse.

Again, a story as old as time.