It's All Gone Pete Tong

The king is deaf, long live the king. So goes the story of superstar DJ Frankie Wilde (Kaye) in this sly and ultimately sweet mockumentary that finally answers the question: What's so cool about Ibiza? (Plenty of scotch and a killer sunset, apparently.) Few things are as overripe for parody as global DJ culture, and Brit comic Kaye joyously milks the moribund movement and the globe-hopping party lifestyle that surrounds it. Laced throughout with real-world DJ personalities – Carl Cox, Paul Van Dyk, Tiësto – Dowse's pseudo-affectionate take on the dance-all-night/party-all-day hedonism that is the GNP of that sunny Spanish isle is one brilliantly conceived and realized joke. Kaye plays Wilde, the most popular DJ ever, who, in the midst of a coke-addled, sex-fueled summer residency on Ibiza, discovers he's losing his hearing and therefore his raison d'etre. The obvious comic possibilities may well be endless, but Dowse and Kaye are aiming a good sight higher than most music mockumentaries, and despite the unflagging barrage of druggy humor, It's All Gone Pete Tong is at its core an ultimately gentle tale of redemption. It's almost too easy to paint the whole thing as a metaphor for the stagnant state of electronica these days, but why not? As Frankie Wilde, Kaye lives and looms large only to fall from grace when his ears go tinny, resulting in the immediate exodus of his egregiously shallow wife, Sonja (Magowan), and bringing the drunken ire of his manager Max (Wilmot), who's expecting a new album any day now. Faced with the loss of his only non-negotiable sensory input, Wilde first ignores the problem, with predictably disastrous results for the dance floor. After denial, of course, comes anger (trashing the villa), bargaining (getting a hearing aid), depression (holing up in the villa with plenty of party favors), and, finally, acceptance (meeting a sexy lip-reading tutor and Learning to Live Again). The five stages or grief are easier, one presumes, with a well-stocked bar at hand, and so the newly deaf Wilde charges forward with all manner of mood-elevating elixirs, which results in nightly hallucinogenic visits from a 6-foot-tall talking badger, aptly named "the coke badger." Gonzo surreality aside, It's All Gone Pete Tong (the title is Cockney rhyming slang for "It's all gone wrong" – and Pete Tong, by the way, is a DJ of some renown) is a smart albeit uneven jab at everything from the clubbing life to the male inclination toward Peter Pan. Wilde, the leader of Ibiza's lost boys, is ultimately saved from coke badgers, hearing loss, and worse by that most prosaically poetic of all thudding basslines: his heart. It's enough to bring a tear to your Technics, but chances are you'll be grinning too much to notice.