The “jukebox musical” has been around on the big screen for a while now — ranging from 1978’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to 2008’s “Mamma Mia!” — and they all face the same existential problem: how to shoehorn a fistful of well-known pop songs into something resembling a story line.
“Rock of Ages,” based on the 2008 Broadway musical of the same name, plunders the catalog of 1980s hair-metal power ballads to tell the story of, well, a couple of kids in the ’80s who dream of being hair-metal stars. Points for originality, people.
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