A Cute, Prosaic Indigo Girls Jukebox Musical
It isn’t every day you encounter a pop-disco musical about a buoyant aspiring circus performer and a brooding aspiring rock singer with competing Mommy issues falling in love in Mexico City against the electricized rearrangements of the Indigo Girls. And that’s not exactly lamentable, because I wouldn’t categorize English-language Glitter & Doom as necessarily essential cinema … though I also couldn’t accuse it of being anything other than original either. (Well, except for the foundational premise of opposites attracting and then ultimately clashing over dueling artistic ambitions.) Director Tom Gustafson (Were the World Mine) has crafted a sweet if plodding love story but it’s hard to truly hate on this whirling candy-colored poetic fairytale — it’s just too sincere, much like the musical source material. It is perhaps somewhat unexpected that the oeuvre of a folk duo led by two down-to-earth platonic queer women (considered to be the very definition of crunchy 90s “lesbian rock”) has become the foundation of an EDM-inspired musical romance between two disparately glamorous men. If someone had asked me how …