THE NEW “FAME” IS FULL-FRONTAL CREATIVITY

“Fame” has returned feeling bigger, brighter and fresher than next week. This update of the 29-year-old Oscar-winning film is directed by 22-year-old TV dance phenom Kevin Tancharoen. He fills the screen with zing, zip and…yes, the fear of failure…that comes from knowing you are an enormously talented teenager on the brink of entering high school.

What makes this fine remake, bristling with eager choreography and songs of soulful yearning, feel so compelling is the way it captures the sweet innocence of kids convinced at age 14 that they will never have a better chance at fame. After all, they have been accepted into this arts academy that gets 10,000 applications for every school year’s new class of 200 entering freshmen.

A cast of unknown singers, dancers and musicians playing wide-eyed students enrolled in New York City’s High School for the Performing Arts beautifully captures the mounting pressure on youngsters slowly coming to realize the supply of pure talent will always exceed the marketplace demand – even in New York.

Charles S. Dutton and Bebe Neuwirth play the main instructors as phenomenally talented individuals who gave up their own personal dreams of fame in order to be the guides who set insecure adolescents on that path to greatness. Are these adults simply leading lambs to slaughter…or putting young artists with exceptional potential on the launch pads that will shoot them towards their own blazing balls of show business success?

Statistically, of course, most of these eager students won’t make it off the launch pad. This is the ghost of bittersweet truth that hangs over the shoulder of every scene. The film is separated into Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years, but wisely refuses to tie us into soap opera dramas of simplified grabs for success.

There are a few of those moments, which become the weakest parts of “Fame” – the obvious hooks to catch a larger audience than the core group of high school students and sentimental adults who already love the performing arts.

For the most part each scene of striving for understanding, for ways to link spontaneous natural talent together with the structures of discipline, for channeling anger into creativity, for avoiding the addiction of intensity is offered freely without being anchored to some morality lesson.

As examples, we get to see dancers leap and singers soar in spontaneous explosions of creativity. In this school, when a student sits down to play, she can really play. Every lesson offers more golden apples of insight to the psychology of nurturing these compulsive moments.

In the beginning each student comes to class with as much excess baggage as actual skill. Some are good at expressing beauty, others at creating chaos with a guitar or set of turntables; some relish the noise of conflict, others the lyricism of sincerity. Talented kids who grew up in the street have one kind of advantage, talented kids from wealthy homes have another.

We in the audience don’t care. We only want a messenger who will bring us the soothing, inspiring, invigorating artistry that is our own drug of choice for getting through the day. And so these students, gifted with a hotline to the bubbling heart of creativity, compete to become the one who will bring the latest word we need so badly.

To see “Fame” and get a taste of how these budding candidates have to do it is to appreciate the messenger that much more.