Directors: Abraham Troen, Angelique Molina
Stars: Tiffany Galaviz, Janina Colucci, Mateo Gonzales, Sam Avila
Synopsis: On the cusp of graduation, the members of USC’s celebrated SoCal VoCals have one more challenge to conquer before adulthood: The International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in New York City.
Rest assured: If everything you knew about A Cappella came from Glee and/or Pitch Perfect, you’re not alone. The same goes for many of the harmonizing members of the University of Southern California’s premiere instrument-free singing group, the SoCal VoCals, and many of them feel as though they’ve been plucked out of those aforementioned fictional choirs to lead a real one. Perhaps that’s a credit to how in touch shows and films that center on A Cappella ensembles tend to be with the broadened stereotypes that make up its members, or a direct criticism of the assumption audiences have maintained since Glee, that these world class voices to belong to gay Latinos, goth Asians, and one particularly annoying, angel-voiced Jewish girl in a pleated skirt. In any case, thanks a lot, Ryan Murphy.
A sincere kudos is owed to Abraham Troen and Angelique Molina – the co-directors of Just Sing, a Tribeca-premiering documentary that centers on the SoCal VoCals pursuit of a collegiate A Cappella championship – for acknowledging these clichés and allowing their subjects to address them in the interviews that make up the prologue of the film rather than those filling its entirety. The other interviews with members of the group tend to align with where we are in the documentary’s narrative, a basic (at best) structure that doubles between detailing a few of the group members’ individual journeys to this point in their lives and singing careers, and the VoCals’ run to what would potentially be a record-breaking sixth International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella title. To answer your burning question: Indeed, the competition hosted by Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins in Pitch Perfect is very, very real.
And for the students we meet in Just Sing, it’s just as borderline life-or-death as it was for the Chloe and Aubrey-led Barton University Bellas. (You know, before Anna Kendrick showed up and made singing fun.) Members of the VoCals are as prone to saying things like “I never want to say, ‘I sang in college,’” as they are to suddenly bursting into song on the bus to their next competition. In all likelihood, most of them will continue to sing for the rest of their lives, whether in a professional capacity or an everyday amateur one, if only because they’re all ridiculously talented. If we’re to use Glee as a reference point, the VoCals certainly have a Rachel Berry (Tiffany Galaviz, Just Sing’s de facto star), a Santana Lopez (Janina Colucci), and a few Kurt Hummel-Blaine Anderson hybrids to boot. Not because they’re gay, but because they are far better singers than Finn Hudson ever was.
What predominantly links an honest nonfiction work like Just Sing to a hyperbolic, often-offensive comedy series like Glee is its competition-related emotional manipulation technique, a staple in documentaries like it and in any medium in which a team is chasing some form of glory. It’s akin to Last Chance U and Cheer, two Netflix docuseries’ that followed a junior college football team and cheer squad, respectively, in their pursuit of a trophy at season’s end. But a film requires much more than the inherent care its viewers will have for the success of its on-screen subjects. You’d be considered a sociopath if you viewed a piece of entertainment like Last Chance U or Just Sing and longed for its participants to fail, regardless of whether or not you find them likeable. It’s a gambit that has never failed when it comes to projects like these, but said projects can’t live and die by that scheme, either.
Additionally, an entire season of television, streaming or otherwise, affords viewers the opportunity to invest in the arcs of a few signature “characters,” if you will. Their academics, home environments, and romantic entanglements are both tracked alongside and considered as important as their athletics. Just Sing, though it does its best to highlight a few of the more interesting members of the VoCals, has but 93 minutes to document the team’s competition circuit, their rehearsals, the impact of the group itself on its participants and A Cappella culture as a whole, and to emphasize the personal lives of the few subjects it deems worthy of further exploration. It’s a fine amount of time, but not enough to do the work it saddles itself with.
You’ll never hear this critic saying he wishes a film had been a series – not even a mini one; sorry, Adolescence – but there’s plenty of meat on Just Sing’s bones that Troen and Molina fail to gnaw off, a frustrating development for those who enter the film starved for intrigue. And though you’re bound to be wholly concerned with the outcome of the SoCal VoCals’ championship aspirations, the beats their journey follows feel too clean and too obvious to ever fully consider as anything but predestined, despite our most predictive efforts. That’s not to say that the film is fictionalized in any sense, but that it’s roughly as surprising as the concept of one of its many excellent vocalists tripping over their falsettos as the spotlight shines its brightest. You never expect them to, and they never do. They may not sound off-pitch, but the same can’t be said for the story they’re in.
