Its title riffing on rock stars' Winehousian penchant for snuffing it at 27, Scott Rosenbaum's pallid grunge-messiah music pic neither burns out nor fades away---try sputtering like a cigarette butt in a bottle of warm Bud Light. Framed with flashbacks to a washed-up singer named Spyder (Zegers) being grilled by an alt-weekly scribe, the movie rewinds to 1991, with the reclusive singer of band the Lost Soulz begging his childhood pal, Eric (Ritter), to write songs for the band's new album. The hitch is that his friend had inadvertently penned the group's first record; Spyder swiped his demos, cut a massive hit, then wrote a follow-up that promptly tanked. In exchange for his services, Eric demands a cross-country road trip along the former Route 66, with the star's manager (Manning) and an ancient hanger-on (Peter Fonda) in tow.
Zegers looks less like any real-life model than Michael Pitt's ersatz Kurt Cobain in Last Days, which neatly encapsulates Perfect Age's thrice-removed rapport with real life. The movie reveals its true sense of tone-deafness, however, in a scene in which the feuding friends happen upon a roadside juke joint whose ambient African-Americanism magically revives their flagging creativity. One only hopes that Ruby Dee, Michael K. Williams and the late, great Pinetop Perkins were paid well for their wasted time.
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