It's really great. All the singing provides a tender and rough vision of masculinity. Mary Louise Parker looks seriously badass playing an electric guitar. The scene with Sarandon singing "Piece of My Heart" in her church choir, with Eddie Izzard as the choir director, and coming full circle on her Rocky Horror performance, is worth the price of a rental, or your monthly Netflix fee.
And it brings me, in a roundabout way, to Glee. As someone who can't sing a lick, but spent all four years of high school immersed in a competitive activity that was obsessive, cult-like, and sort of incomprehensible to the outside world, I was perfectly primed to fall all over the pilot, which aired this spring, and includes all sort of marvelously surreal details, including Jane Lynch as a maniacal cheerleading coach hollering "You think this is hard? I'm living with Hepatitis, that's hard!" at her squad; the delightfully alien-eyed Jayma Mays, badly used in Ugly Betty, as a charming germophobe; a mercenary principal; and of course, white-bread Ohio teenagers mugging in fifties outfits as they sing a choral arrangement of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." Even if you haven't seen the Glee pilot, or even weren't aware of its existence, you must have noticed the resurgence of "Don't Stop Believing" as a summer song, driven by the infectious rendition that closes that episode.
And now, it appears that they're going the Romance & Cigarettes route:
I think this will make the show or ruin it. One of the reasons the singing worked in Romance & Cigarettes was that the characters weren't singers, and so the singing added a depth of emotion to their performances. James Gandolfini seems genuinely melancholy singing "A Man Without Love" or wearied doing "Red-Headed Woman." Glee's already got the choir's performances as a proxy for the characters' emotions, so it might be overkill. It would be too bad if the songs traded off with some of the other, loopier characters and plot developments that the pilot started to develop, since I think it would be good for Fox to do a show with a sense of irony and humor about itself. And I do worry that the vocal styles they'll choose will enhance, rather than play against the high-school archetypes they've chosen: the overachieving smart girl, the soulful football player, the Marc Jacobs-wearing coded-gay kid, the guy in the wheelchair...well, actually, other than being bullied, he's not much of stereotype, and he plays a mean electric guitar. But you get the point.
Starting out by releasing a video of the black female student singing a Mary-J-Blige-inflected he-done-me-wrong number furthers my concern. But I do like the fact that her heartbreak is inspired by the (white) kid the first episode implies is gay, and that she gets to turn the annoying and anemic cheerleaders who are washing cars into her backup dancers. And also, her performance is terrific: great voice, lived in, mature without seeming too old for high school. I think there's no denying that Glee's got the makings of great fun in it. If it manages to mix up high-school types in some new and fresh ways, that'll be a side bonus.