Rock School
If you took electric-guitar lessons from Paul Green, you might end up a rock virtuoso. You might also end up under heavy sedation. Here are some of the more printable things he says to his teenage students in the course of the documentary ''Rock School": ''The whole trend in education is to not compare kids. I compare kids"; ''Do you love this song? Do you love Dio? Do you love Satan?"; and -- my favorite -- ''I will kill your family and bathe in their blood."
That'll get the little buggers to practice.
If this approach to scholastic achievement sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of Jack Black in the 2003 film ''School of Rock." That comedy was based loosely on the real-life Paul Green School of Rock Music in Philadelphia, an after-school program about which director Don Argott was making a nonfiction film even before Hollywood bigfooted the property.
''School of Rock" goes completely unmentioned in ''Rock School," which is something of a shame. You come out dearly wanting to know what Paul Green thinks of Jack Black -- presumably it would constitute libel -- since the former makes the latter look like a Barry Manilow fan.
In many respects, of course, the fictional construct and the real guy seem the same. Receding hairline and career as a failed rock musician, check; black T-shirts and love of AC/DC, check; lack of verbal filter, double-check. But Black's Dewey Finn goes soft toward the end of the ''School of Rock" -- he has to, it's a studio film -- and Green, if anything, gets more impossible as the documentary progresses. It's one thing to be a teacher with a cult of personality. It's another to scream profanities at your students until they cry.
And yet parents continue to send their children to him to learn the basics of rock 'n' roll musicianship, and you can see why: The kids learn a healthy respect for this madman and an understanding of both the tedium and the joy of creating. ''It's not 'Come look at the kids playing music,' " Green insists in one of his more cogent moments. ''It's 'Come look at the kids playing music well.' "
So we get 12-year-old CJ Tywoniak, a born guitar god who kicks off the film with a rendition of ''Black Magic Woman" that stands as the school's best mission statement. Or Madi Diaz Svalgard, a guitar-strumming folkie teen who Green quickly weans off Sheryl Crow and into multi-instrumental confidence. Madi's a Quaker -- in a very funny tangent, we meet some of her rapper peers -- but she's also one of the few kids willing to give it back to Green as hard as he hands it out.
And we get the 9-year-old twins Asa and Tucker Collins, hilarious little surfer dudes who are here to bang at their instruments because their mother's a groupie at heart. Most poignantly, there's Will O'Connor, a mopey adolescent basket case with a long list of grievances against the world and a noted lack of musical ability. He's on-board because the Rock School is the one place that will let him belong, not that it makes Green go any easier on him.
When Green shrieks at the kids, ''Don't [expletive] make mistakes! Not on 'Rebel Yell'!," he's his own worst advertisement. Indeed, it's a shock to learn, midway through the film, that he's married with a newborn child. Yet as ''Rock School" leads up to its climax -- a trip to the annual Zappanale in East Germany during which the kids play the fiendishly complicated ''Inca Roads" alongside ex-Frank Zappa sideman Napoleon Murphy Brock -- it's obvious that they have become musicians of a confident and remarkably professional stripe.
Whether that's because of Paul Green or in spite of him remains unclear. Certainly he's flourishing: There are Paul Green Schools of Rock in nine locations, including New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City?). And the movie is provocative evidence of a big, charismatic baby who gets results from his students by acting like a bigger jerk than they ever could. As a portrait of dysfunctional pedagogy, it's both refreshing and more than a little terrifying.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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