‘XOXO’ Unfortunately Demonstrates That Music Is Best Heard And Not Seen

Is music better seen than heard?

The obvious answer is no, but our screens tell a different story: As much as we love listening to music, we love seeing how it came to be. Shows like Empire, Nashville, Mozart in the Jungle, and movies such as Pitch Perfect and Straight Outta Compton tell the stories of people deeply connected by music and how it incontrovertibly shapes their lives.

Alas, Netflix’s latest original film, XOXO, is not one of those stories.

The film, named for the experimental art festival, starts out with the faint promise of treating EDM music with the reverence and depth of the aforementioned texts, but gets continuously sidelined by weak writing and the fact that —how do I put this?— music festivals are the WORST.

XOXO follows half a dozen disparate characters whose paths loosely intersect at XOXO – like Love Actually with molly but bereft of any emotional substance. There’s budding DJ Ethan (Graham Phillips); his best friend-slash-manager Tariq (Brett DelBuono); Krystal (Sarah Hyland), who’s going to meet her text-only soulmate; Shannie (Hayley Kiyoko) and Ray, a couple on the cusp of either breaking up or doing long distance; and Neil (Chris D’Elia), an old school EDM fan who longs for the community’s ’90s-era glory days.

The ensemble isn’t particularly strong, not least because almost everyone is white, which could be a product of poor casting or of studious analysis of the festival crowd, which XOXO described in 2014 as “overwhelmingly white.” Tariq is the only explicitly diverse character, whose entire “arc” is that his immigrant father disapproves of his affinity for music. At least there’s a person of color in the movie, but it’s a low minimum to meet, and a lazy backstory to give him.

There’s even a trio of belligerent bros, only one of whom gets a name and the name is Chad.

At XOXO, Ethan scrambles to make it to his performance, but HIS NAME ISN’T ON ANY OF THE LISTS!! He can’t get through to Tariq because there is no cell service (the most convincing part of the movie), so he wanders desperately, hoping for a break. Shannie and Ray give him one of their tickets and then take to the sewers to sneak into the festival, because sometimes seeing your favorite performer is worth a steep price.

The dialogue is consistently hokey, sounding more like Dialogue than how people actually talk. When Ethan describes what it felt like to be in the crowd at a festival and trails off on the sentence “It just felt like…” it’s easy to chime in and speak in unison as another character finished his sentence: “…you were a part of something bigger.” Some actors and scenes can get away with that, but this one can’t.

If anything redeems the writing, it’s the security guard who tells Ethan “I don’t care what you people do! There’s a guy out there with a vacuum cleaner. I have no idea what he intends to clean with that thing.”

As Ethan wanders the festival, Tariq is jumped by a girl who makes out with him and leaves a hallucinogenic favor in his mouth as she walks away. The resultant trip is one of the best parts of the movie, with Tariq fully losing it and facing the Herculean task of finding Ethan and his XOXO stage (a difficult feat for even the sober festival-goer).

Krystal and Ethan are set up to be our EDM power-couple, but they share minimal screen time. They literally bump into each other and lock eyes over his fallen equipment, a narrative device that can and did do better in the TGIF era. When Krystal finally meets the Prince Charming in her phone, he is a predictable cartoon caricature of a douchebag (complete with a neon glow paint star on his neck that you absolutely cannot avert your eyes from). The Netflix audience has developed its palate for douchery since Steve Harrington, so this basic bro’s brand of bullshit won’t cut it anymore. The same goes for Ryan Hansen as eminent EDM-god Avilo, a role that would have made Kyle Bradway’s life but which Hansen can only do so much to salvage.

D’Elia is the most out of place, wandering XOXO in a baseball shirt and doing his best to improvise humor that doesn’t fit his character at all. Neil is a two-dimensional sourpuss who literally tells someone to kill himself just for asking if there is WiFi on the party bus (this is a thing now, people. Embrace the future). “You all have your phones out, why don’t you live in the moment for two seconds?” Neil says to a group of women, quoting the Grumpy Old Man’s Guide To Grumping. “Everyone’s going to believe that you were here, you don’t need to Snapchat it.”

XOXO feels incomplete in a way that most movies you see in 2016 manage to avoid. We meet the characters but aren’t given ample opportunity to know them, yet we’re expected to invest in their EDM dreams nonetheless. The film would be better served by introducing Ethan before he finished his star-making YouTube mix, seeing him and Tariq as friends, knowing Shannie and Ray together for more than two minutes, and good-girl Krystal getting into EDM by sneaking out of her house and swapping mixes with the kids at school who she thought were weird.

It’s also a huge missed opportunity to explore and expose the audience to quality EDM and its authentic culture. When they all end up at the same stage dancing to “Jai Wolf – Indian Summer,” it’s mainly a reminder that How To Get Away With Murder did it so much better, but also that the right music can make the mood in any movie.

Sadly, in XOXO, that mood falls flat.

[Watch XOXO on Netflix]

Proma Khosla (@promawhatup) is a writer and dancer living in New York City. She graduated from the University of Michigan with an unshakeable desire to work in editorial and entertainment–basically to talk about TV and movies all day in the hopes that someone will care to listen. She also writes for GeekyNews and Fantastic Fandoms, and is also in possession of an impressive collection of personal journals that live in shoe boxes under her bed.