The DVD version of the musical film “Rainbow Around the Sun” recently became available for purchase. I’d heard of it but hadn’t seen it, so I scored a copy late last year.
It’s fantastic. In terms of all-original songwriting (and performance of such), art direction and cinematography, it’s one of the best films I saw in 2009.
By way of background: “Rainbow Around the Sun” nabbed the “Best Oklahoma Film” award at the 2008 deadCENTER Film Festival. It was also an official selection at South by Southwest, the Florida Film Festival, the Athens International Film Festival and elsewhere. It’s an engaging, tuneful experience and worth seeking out.
Much like “Pink Floyd: The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy” (or, if I can get fairly obscure for a sec, “Return to Waterloo,” a wonderful if creepy film that Ray Davies of The Kinks did in the mid-1980s), “Rainbow Around the Sun” is a movie in which rock music doesn’t just augment or accent the narrative — it is the narrative. (It’s also a film that, as the closing credits tell us, was “filmed entirely in the Great State of Oklahoma ... Except for the beach scene. That was Texas.”)
Indeed, the film is based on an album of the same title by Matthew Alvin Brown, an Oklahoma City-based singer-songwriter/actor, who also stars in it. (It’s a quite charming and skillful performance, by the way; he comes across as someone destined for stardom.) Brown is a member of a fine band called The Fellowship Students, and this group appears throughout “Rainbow Around the Sun,” in various guises, performing the music at hand.
Expertly made and off-the-charts creative — especially regarding its music, coloring, props, sets and camera-work (there’s even an animated sequence in the middle of the film, as well as vividly entertaining send-ups of vaudeville, today’s hype-driven press conferences and the classic Hollywood musical, complete with chorus girls and top hats) — “Rainbow Around the Sun” was directed by Kevin Ely and Beau Leland, both well-traveled filmmakers working out of OKC.
Some more background: Ely was a winner at the 2006 Living Arts of Tulsa 24-Hour Video Race; Leland has done much work in the realm of music video production, contributing to videos by Oklahoma outfits such as The Flaming Lips and Hinder. 
And special kudos must be conveyed to Alan Novey, the film’s director of photography, who also worked on an outstanding documentary called “Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo” (which I discussed in this column several months ago, and which has recently appeared at various screenings and film festivals and on Cinemax).
Not surprisingly, “Rainbow Around the Sun” is long on music, short on dialogue — and, since Brown’s songs, equal parts indie-rock and power-pop, are far and away the strongest component of this film, it’s all the better for this formula.
As the directors have noted in a jointly credited statement: “We decided early on to let the songs speak for themselves, and keep the talking to a minimum. Structurally, we drew inspiration from the films of Federico Fellini, Bob Fosse and John Cameron Mitchell. We sequenced musical numbers and dramatic scenes like tracks on an album. Some were ballads; some were rockers.”
And all of them, as it happens, are excellent: catchy, infectious songs presented in memorable visual or dramatic contexts. The plot itself may be on the weak side — the whole big-time-loser-yet-gifted-rock-and-roller-in-search-of-peace-selfhood-or-whatever scenario is, by now, probably a little too familiar — and some of the acting by the film’s supporting players is unnatural or flat to the point of distraction, but no matter. “Rainbow Around the Sun” is a dreamy, diverting and often danceable movie that — like the best albums, of whatever musical genre — hits the mark from start to finish.
Scott Gregory hosts “All This Jazz” on Public Radio 89.5 KWGS, where he also serves as the producer and editor of “Studio Tulsa.”
This article originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of TulsaPeople Magazine.
