Founder of Good Vibrations, Terri Hooley cannot be this simple...
Good Vibrations is the little record company that could. Beginning with a record store set up by the now legendary "Godfather of Ulster Punk", Terri Hooley, it's been around for over 30 years and its story is one of music's most compelling and inspiring tales of challenging the system. It's a huge disappointment then, that this film by Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn about Hooley's journey to historic significance, is so very standard.
It paints Hooley, played here by Richard Dormer, as annoyingly idealistic. We meet him as a young man with an old soul who takes nothing too seriously but recounts his life with a know-it-all air. He's not just telling us about his story, he's giving us some life lessons, none of which are particularly illuminating. And that's the main flaw of this film, it doesn't show Terri's intelligence as much as it shows his ideals. Instead, it paints him as a loveable guy who means a lot to the young musicians he meets as he goes about inspiring a generation while he neglects his supportive wife, played by Jodi Whittaker in a criminally underdeveloped role that, frankly, she's wasted in.
Terri's father on the other hand, gets much less screen time but makes a far more significant impact on a viewing audience with his fantastic lines about measuring success and the occasions that we appear to be challenging the system but aren't. He makes Terri reassess and focus and shows that what the fallible Hooley has to learn is what really makes this film, so it's a shame the directors don't include more of it.
That said, they do give us some nice sequences about the bands Good Vibrations discovered and catapulted to fame, particularly The Undertones and their generation-defining hit, 'Teenage Kicks'. Richard Dormer is also fantastic in this role but he deserves a more complex depiction of Hooley to work with. Put simply, everything presented here is ordinary bio-pic stuff and becomes the kind of film that has a soundtrack which all too easily out-shines everything else about it. 
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