Review by Ian Keogh

Garage Band is a testament to the power of music to cross social barriers and deliver hope as it unites four teenage boys from different backgrounds. Despite the theme it’s unsentimental, lacking any form of mythologising as it considers social implications. The characters are of greater importance than any achievement.

Giuliano is seen first, the son of a man wealthy enough to own a large warehouse that sits empty, which he’s prepared to let his son and his mates use provided they work at cleaning the place up. Alex has a poster of Hitler on his bedroom wall, yet comes from a middle class background raised by his mother and her sister who’re concerned about who he associates with. They’re particularly worried about the crazy kid he knew at school, Stefano, a wild man with no boundaries and positively provocative in offending others, yet insistent other band members turn up on time. Alberto is more laid back and stigmatised by his father’s illness. They’re introduced naturally, each with a personality imprinted from the start, and a testament to how friendship transcends peculiarities, with Alex’s Nazi fixations attributed to idiocy. Giuliano’s issues are more subtly transmitted.

Italian creator Gipi’s alias is formed from the first and last letters of his first name and surname Gianni Pacinotti, and he creates a stylised, but solidly defined world in dark watercolour shades. More than seeing practice sessions, we see the boys with their families and come to understand how it represents hope and escape for them, but when Gipi does draw the band playing, most commonly to end a chapter, it transmits energy and aggression. Detailed sketches of town scenes are another speciality.

Gipi also highlights the songs the various band members write, underplaying how these tie into their lives, yet tellingly Giuliano, the only band member with a girlfriend, doesn’t write about her. Nina is the least developed member of the primary cast, more a means of reflecting Giuliano than a character in her own right.

The drama of events plays out very naturally, with one sequence leading to the next, and with some smartly foreshadowed revelations. It builds to a well conceived ending, theoretically optimistic, but with the seeds already sown for possible fractures. The drama resonates in what’s an absorbing character study.