You can’t get much more Hollywood than a film that doesn’t just refer to but recreates Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King, King Kong, even Ghostbusters (and opens on Oscar weekend, no less)— unless it’s a film by Michel Gondry.
 

Gondry’s been tweaking and toying with cinematic expectations since Human Nature (2001). After that, he and Charlie Kaufman took romance, shook it up, turned it upside down, and out dropped a scintillating marriage of celluloid and memory—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Film became the stuff of dreams in The Science of Sleep (2006), another romantic anti-romance that tinkered even more magically with whispery special effects, recycled objects, and surreal backdrops.
 

Once again, with Be Kind Rewind, Gondry zags instead of zigs. The Frenchman—a drummer in ’80s pop-rock band Oui Oui before directing music videos in the early ’90s—has riffed off the documentary he made in 2005. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party was a star-studded (the Fugees, Erykah Badu) version of the traditional African-American urban gathering, where neighbours hit the corner to enjoy some food and listen to music.
 

“I grew up listening to black music and I always was interested in why all the modern pop culture mostly was derivative of the black community in America,” Gondry explains over the phone. “I got very lucky to be asked by Dave Chappelle to shoot [that] concert, and I got a better sense of the African-American community.”
 

In Be Kind Rewind, the community is in Passaic, New Jersey, where a rundown little video rental store sits on the corner. After kooky scrapyard owner Jerry (Jack Black) gets magnetized and erases all the store’s tapes while Mike (Mos Def) is in charge for a few days, the duo start “sweding” Hollywood films—remaking shorter versions of them on the cheap. They’re joined by another local, Alma (Melonie Diaz, the stand-out here), who becomes the brains behind the new business.

 

Gondry drops his wonderfully playful touches, recycled objects and visual flourishes again here, but this time for a more political message, about how much the average person’s history—like the African-American story behind so much modern music—has been marginalized and ignored. The Hollywood formula flicks are easily distilled by Jerry, Mike and Alma (and Be Kind Rewind itself is a take on save-the-building stories like *batteries not included), but then they move on by rewinding. Neighbours get together for an original film about the history of jazz great Fats Waller. The little store at 261 Main St gives birth to a big band of filmmakers who move away from the mainstream in their own offbeat way and finally see themselves—the common folk—up there on the screen.
 

“It’s why we talk about Fats Waller in the story,” explains Gondry. “This sense of people, when they don’t have choice, create their own entertainment. They become highly creative.” 
 

“This idea that people are capable of creating their own entertainment that not only they enjoy but other people can enjoy [is what drives this film],” he continues. “And in the process they become really creative and they change the course of pop music or art or whatever. It’s been going over and over in music. And I was imagining this phenomenon happening in film.
 

That’s played out quite literally in Be Kind Rewind, and the community-produced version of Fats Waller’s story leads to a block film party in what may be the most touching ending of Gondry’s films.

If Waller is, as the director points out, an intriguing “role model [because he’s] not necessarily the good guy you would expect,” everyone else in Be Kind Rewind is pretty decent, though never in a boring way. The film’s kindness is unusually refreshing to see. 
 

“So many films are based on revenge or meanness,” Gondry says. “There are few directors who talk about helping each other and kindness because it’s sort of uncool and it’s easier to manipulate people with frustrated feelings or revenge feelings. And this kind of attitude that you dismiss others with is very common in film, even independent film. And I find it more challenging to talk about kindness and to show an example of people who are trying to prove that being kind to each other is actually working and is necessary.”
 

This sense of film as a communal act rides along on a jazzy, improvisational feel in Gondry’s most soulful work. Block parties have traditionally been powered by electricity siphoned off from the grid; in Be Kind Rewind, the electrified Jerry and his friends take the power back with a video camera. 
 

“It’s true,” the director says, “that a bunch of people living in Beverly Hills are sort of deciding what a bunch of people living in New Jersey would like and I think there’s something wrong in that. And as well, most actors live a life that has nothing to do with regular people but then they embody regular people in every movie they shoot, which is weird as well.”
 

In a world of YouTube, cheap DV cameras and digital downloading, Gondry wonders why even more film can’t made out of the local, the everyday. “
 

When people are given the chance to be creative, they can really reveal treasure that they would not expect. It’s because they are never asked to do anything. When we shot the film, we incorporated a lot of local kids participating, and you see them a lot in the Fats Waller clips. And they were just great because they were not fed up with the camera and [had a lot] that they wanted to do. I think when people get a little bit of trust, they rise to the occasion.”
 

After all, Gondry says, Be Kind Rewind is meant to provide exactly that kind of encouragement—not exactly a standard Hollywood message. 

“I want to encourage people to do movies as an activity and be creative for just the sake of entertaining themselves,” he says. “And I think if everybody would try, we would have an amazing result.