Josh Spiegel
The ads have felt ubiquitous recently for the upcoming A Minecraft Movie, which is nothing if not a direct description of the video game being adapted after years of popularity. While the new family film takes place in the world of Minecraft, its main characters appear to be living, breathing humans, led by a man with delightfully wild eyes, a bushy mane of hair and a silvery beard, and a Nicholson-esque grin that hovers between being goofy and a little terrifying. That man is longtime A-Lister Jack Black, who has been a mainstay of modern comedy and family films for a quarter century after toiling in smaller supporting roles in the 1990s. The film that cemented his status as a scene-stealing oddball turns 25 this month, and it didn’t even seem to portend a future of family-friendly fare: High Fidelity.
Based on the Nick Hornby novel of the same name, High Fidelity shifts the locale from London to Chicago, focusing on record-store owner Rob (John Cusack), just as he’s going through a rough breakup. Rob and the awkward friends with whom he works at Championship Vinyl filter their lives through top-five lists and pop culture itself. Dick (Todd Louiso) is shy and relatively unassuming, but anyone would seem that way compared to the hard-charging Barry (Black), who sneers at his co-workers and customers alike for daring to have different tastes.
Barry is a tornado of energy, bursting into the store to loudly play “Walkin’ On Sunshine” and mimic having sex while rocking out to the bouncy single. “How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?” Barry later snidely asks his boss when Rob drops a less-than-impressive top-five list of the best first tracks on any band’s vinyl releases. As written, the character could be so annoying that you’d want him off-screen at all times. But Black imbues Barry with a gleeful glint of mischief, in spite of very much being a supporting character separate from the main story, focused on Rob tracking his checkered romantic past.
Black’s balance of a John Belushi-esque comic aura and his own musical talents (briefly spotlighted at the end of High Fidelity as Barry sings “Let’s Get It On”) fused perfectly in his first starring role, in the 2003 comedy School of Rock, wherein his musical snobbery softened just a bit. That softening enables his character Dewey Finn to teach a group of NYC prep-school kids about true rock-and-roll music under the guise of being his substitute-teacher roommate. Anyone who felt as if they were introduced to Black in High Fidelity would no doubt enjoy the sense that he was now playing the inverse of Barry. It’s accurate that Dewey, like Barry, has extensive musical knowledge, but his snobbery has turned away everyone else and made him something of a pariah, until he can crawl back from rock bottom by helping educate other kids to love music just as passionately as he does.
Although High Fidelity is very much an R-rated film (including the scenes featuring Barry, who’s as profane as he is snobbish), once Black shifted to the more family-friendly School of Rock, he pretty much shifted into that gear for good and it’s borne plenty of fruit. Though he’s appeared in some more grown-up fare, like Tropic Thunder and Bernie, Black is also the star of multiple DreamWorks Animation titles, like Shark Tale and the Kung Fu Panda franchise, and has been part of other big series, like the recent Jumanji films and Goosebumps. We’re also well past the point when it feels like his star presence is so established that other actors end up aping him in roles that feel designed for his persona. (If you ever are inspired to rewatch Pixar’s Onward, realize that Chris Pratt – with whom Black would eventually co-star in the Super Mario Bros. Movie – is doing a Jack Black impersonation as much as anything else.)
Jack Black was just 30 when Touchstone Pictures released High Fidelity in the spring of 2000, but when it arrived, he became one of the most undeniable parts of what made the film so special. Barry is far from the focal point of the film, but anytime Black and Cusack bounce off each other, it’s incredibly funny and distinctive, and stands the test of time potentially better than any other aspect of the story. Black had shown up in quick roles in a number of notable 1990s efforts, like Mars Attacks! and Enemy of the State, but High Fidelity set him on the road to stardom, even if the road was more family-friendly than expected. For good or ill, to look at him in A Minecraft Movie is to remember that it all started in a little record store in Chicago.
“High Fidelity” is streaming on Hulu.
