This TV movie bio is very similar to "Daydream Believers: The Monkees Story", which was shot the following year (although the two productions weren't the effort of the same company or crew).
Both are somewhat simplistic biographies about the making a fictional pop-rock band that starred in a TV show, and the friction behind the scenes.
Both movies used look-alike actors to play the original cast members. And both movies focused on young men who got a tremendous break in showbiz, and achieved teen Idol status, yet who weren't satisfied because the roles they played didn't represent who they really were.
In the case of the Monkees, the boys resented the fact that they weren't originally allowed to play their own music, and spent much of their time trying to become a real band. In this case, it is David Cassidy who is the disgruntled member, chafing at the fact that he has to play a high school student on the show and be a heartthrob to a lot of little girls, when he was really 20 years old and apparently a bit of a scoundrel in real life. And it appears that members of both groups resented being on rather silly, unrealistic shows.
Yet they all sought out those parts, auditioned for them; they were actors who knew what they were getting into, and their job as actors was to play the roles written for them. If they didn't like the parts, it seems they shouldn't have taken them in the first place, rather than whine about their roles once they had them.
In the case of the Monkees, their effort to perform their own songs did not turn out well in the long run. The group had some of the best songwriters in the industry, and churned out a large number of hits when they were performing them. But once they switched to their own music, they started sliding down the charts into obscurity.
And according to this movie, David Cassidy's adult antics and threats to leave the show apparently resulted in them canceling the sitcom earlier than they otherwise would have. And his post-Partridge career didn't exactly set the world on fire.
In both instances, it seems that the adults in the room actually knew what they were doing when they were making the shows, and the kids rocking of the boat ultimately just cut short their own careers. They would probably have been a lot better off if they had just kicked back and enjoyed the ride on the fame train while they were on it.
But back to the movie itself.
It kept repeating the same beats: focusing on Danny and his sullen, unemployed father who resents his son's success; the youngest boy on the show, who is constantly pictured as a hyperactive, out-of-control child; and David's resentment about playing a younger role and being a teen idol.
Honestly, David Cassidy was incredibly lucky to land this role to begin with, so it's a bit irritating to hear that his character complain about it not reflecting his real life. Fictional TV roles aren't supposed to reflect an actor's real life; the actor is supposed to pretend to be the fictional character. That's why it's called acting.
And they spend much too much time focusing on Danny's grumpy father. Since he never turned out to be an ax murderer or anything, there is no reason for the camera to spend that much time staring at the sad guy, except for a poverty of other ideas.
They throw in mock concert footage of most of "The Partridge Family"'s major hits, so newcomers can at least get a taste of what they sounded like. And the songs are still catchy today.
There isn't much new here. Most of the anecdotes we see are probably already well-known to fans of the show, via various biographies and cast interviews. And those situations are presented in a very abbreviated fashion.
But the movie is also dotted with scenes that seem exaggerated.
One example is when David "kidnaps" Danny, steals the Partridge Family bus, rams it through the studio gate (breaking it), and then the bus just happens to break down next to a private school so that obsessed teenage girls on the playground can spot David and mob the bus. And if that's not enough, a public school bus stops at the same exact moment, so the girls from that bus can join the screaming mob. Good grief.
There's probably just a grain of truth to that story. David probably did once borrow the bus and drove some of the kids that around the Valley, but, as usual, Hollywood just can't resist goosing it up into nonsense territory.
On the positive side, the actors they found to portray the original cast members did actually resemble the original players (at least to some extent), although the actor playing David Cassidy lacked that somewhat debauched look that David often had, despite his young age.
Overall, there are worse ways to spend 100 minutes. But it's sort of like reading a Reader's Digest version of a gossip magazine.
