Despite a hard rocking performance from Tom Cruise, Rock of Ages fails to tap into that sex, drugs and sleazy rock ‘n’ roll spirit of the 1980s with director Adam Shankman confusing glam with camp.

The glam metal scene of the 1980s was more than just big hair, tight pants and power ballads. There was an attitude, a grittiness and a danger that Hollywood have rarely been able to duplicate on the big screen. Rock of Ages tries to buck that trend yet fails, mainly due to the fact that while Shankman knows how to make a musical he doesn’t know how to harness that rock ‘n’ roll spirit and make it scream like a Fender Strat plugged into a wall of Marshall amps.

No doubt the reason it is more spirit fingers than head banging is that Rock of Ages is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name. Set in the infamous Sunset Strip in Los Angeles where bands like Motley Crue and Guns ‘n’ Roses made their name, the film focuses on Sherrie (Julianne Hough) and Drew (Diego Boneta) young lovers with big Hollywood ambitions.

While Boneta and the ridiculously sexy Hough are more than capable of delivering on the singing front, the pair seem very much out of place as if they were taking part of a high school musical rendition of the Decline of Western Civilisation Part II: The Metal Years (well worth looking up for a more accurate portrait of the Strip in the 80s).

The same can’t be said of Tom Cruise, with the brilliantly absurd idea of casting the world’s biggest movie star as glam metal king Stacee Jaxx (imagine Axl Rose meets Jim Morrison with a dash of Bret Michaels) a stroke of genius.

When Cruise is first introduced as Jaxx he emerges under a blanket of groupies wearing ass-less chaps and a bottle of Jack Daniels permanently attached to his right hand. But most impressive is Cruise’s handling of the vocal duties, bringing a level of curious risk to otherwise glossed up interpretations of hard rock classics, which in structure and execution are not too far removed from a production number in Glee: all talented choreography yet no wild rebellious spirit.

But at least there is some entertainment to be found in its musical numbers, for the scripted moments in between - where even Alec Baldwin can’t get a laugh - are of the most tiresome, clichéd variety, which is disappointing since screenwriters Justin Theroux and Allan Loeb have proven themselves to be capable writers.  

It all comes down to Shankman’s less than convincing establishment of tone and also his prejudices which frequently show up in his work. Whereas the stage play featured a pair of money hungry German developers as its villains, Shankman succumbs to his Christian bigotry (as he did in Hairspray and short Prop 8: The Musical) and has created a right wing, censorship seeking, religious zealot as his bad guy played with hammy intensity by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Perhaps it’s too late for Shankman to realise that the real life version of that character is Tipper Gore, wife of former Democrat vice president and global warming pope Al Gore.  

There is a line in the Rock of Ages delivered by Baldwin’s rock bar owner who says: “This place is about to become a sea of sweat, ear-shattering music and puke”. We can only wish, with Rock of Ages proving itself to be less Motley Crue and more High School Musical.