The absurdist dark comedy Stadium Anthems holds a savage mirror to the post-Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo world in its sharp and raunchy satirization of sexist entertainment industry executives and its observations of the women forced to share in those work environments.
Shot as a mockumentary and supported by unrelenting electric guitar-based rock and roll, the elevated vulgarity of Stadium Anthems takes place in the post-Napster wasteland of today's recorded music business. Long-standing record label Dragon Chaser Records is a male-dominated Human Resources nightmare, willfully oblivious to employment law and the paradigm shifts within the modern recorded music industry. Company president Jim Strong sleeps with his pretty assistant and ignores financial trends. Chief talent spotter Pete Barnacle chases women beyond his marriage and won't scout bands. And preposterously well-endowed but increasingly outdated rock god Warren Paradise - the label's only remaining source of revenue - has long since traded artistic credibility for vapid songs and vacant sex.
As the corrupted male buffoons of Stadium Anthems meet their darkly twisted fates, arrested adolescence gives way to the film's defining feminist arc: Pete's chance encounter with Heroine Jones - an art teacher working as a bartender and exhibitionist to fund student art supplies - reawakens in him the purity of intention in creating art beyond its consideration as a commodity. Ironically, only through Heroine can the record label's resident cavemen seek redemption. Which begs of the audience...can such men ever really be redeemed?