Cruise, Baldwin hit high notes in 'Rock of Ages'

All movies require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, but “Rock of Ages” makes the challenge tougher than most: To truly enjoy it, you must be willing to pretend that some of the songs from one of the worst periods of the rock era — the late 1980s — are inspirational anthems instead of commercial pabulum.

Geez. How come no one makes movies about Let’s Active or the dB’s?

Be that as it may, in fairness, the songs used in the film — hits from the likes of Journey, Foreigner, Poison, Twister Sister and Whitesnake — are more enjoyable in the cover versions here than they were on the radio at the time, and director Adam Shankman seems to know this and has fun with it; certainly his cast does. And he gets enormously entertaining performances from Tom Cruise and Alec Baldwin, so much so that it’s a problem: The movie’s not about them. It’s about Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) and Drew Boley (Diego Boneta), “just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world. …” Hmm. You see the effect these songs have. Anyway, the movie is set in 1987, when Sherrie, an aspiring singer, boards a bus from her hometown in Oklahoma for LA. Of course the bus breaks into “Sister Christian.” This is a musical, after all (based on Chris D’Arienzo’s Broadway show).

Sherrie meets Drew, and they instantly fall for each other; he even gets her a job at the club where he works, the Bourbon Room on the Sunset Strip. Like Sherrie, Drew wants to be a singer, but neither has much in the way of prospects. The club is owned by Dennis Dupree (Baldwin), an old-time rocker with tax problems. He needs a big show, and it looks like he’s going to get one: Arsenal, a band fronted by the astoundingly dissolute singer Stacee Jaxx (Cruise), has agreed to play its final show at the Bourbon Room before Jaxx embarks on his solo career — at least if the band’s weasel of a manager (Paul Giamatti) comes through on the promise.

Putting the music aside, the bigger problem is that Hough and Boneta, for all the enthusiasm they bring to their characters, just aren’t all that interesting. The film is much more intriguing when Cruise is on-screen, or Baldwin, or Russell Brand, as the Bourbon Club’s technician. They, in short, rock.

Someone ought to. Rock music’s liberating spirit is supposed to be at the center of the movie, but the characters on its edges are the only ones who embody it.