In the 1978 film American Hot Wax we first see “Teenage Louise,” a skinny Brooklyn girl with long curly hair, stuffing Kleenex down her sweater. She's on her way to ambush Alan Freed, the most popular disc jockey in America, to pitch him her songs. Louise is played by Laraine Newman, in a performance that makes me wish she had done more serious acting back in the seventies and eighties. (Her talent was wasted playing the mother in Tobe Hooper's kid-oriented 1986 remake of Wlliam Cameron Menzies's Cold War Freudian horror, Invaders from Mars.)

American Hot Wax is the story of three days in the life of Alan Freed (Tim McIntire), the disc jockey who supposedly invented the term “rock and roll.” It's three days until Freed hosts the first anniversary rock and roll show in Brooklyn. It's 1959.

Tim McIntire as Alan Freed, inventor of "rock and roll"

One scene seems like it belongs in director Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 film noir Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. Freed makes his way through a smoky night club, accepting the sycophancy of artists and agents who need his approval now that he's on top. Freed gives some money to an out of work DJ because he knows it might have easily been him who needed the handout. It soon will be. His career is threatened by the payola scandal about to be exposed.

These three days show Freed's career beginning to slide, but Teenage Louise is about to achieve her dream, writing songs professionally for groups like the Chesterfields, four singers she meets on the street outside Freed's office. Like her, they're trying to get the attention of the most influential man in radio.

Laraine Newman as "Teenage Louise" with the Chesterfields

Teenage Louise, driven and a little lonely, is a character based on Carole King, another white girl from Brooklyn who put teenage angst into serious songs like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”

Louise's parents are nice liberal middle-class people who don't mind when she brings her black friends home to practice her songs, but they want her to go to college. “That's not what I want to do.” When she drags her father over to the piano to play him one of her songs, he's surprised by how moving it is.

The whirlwind

American Hot Wax was filmed in real streets, apartments, and studios, with the camera sometimes distant from the actors. This makes the movie look like a black and white documentary. Freed is always at the center of a whirlwind, people swirling around him. Even with agents and artists screaming at Freed, we're drawn to the edges, where silent Louise takes everything in.

Finally, on the night of the Big Concert, Freed finds Louise backstage, crying. “What's the matter, teenager?”

Nothing. The Chesterfields are a hit. The audience loves her song. Louise has a new life ahead of her.

“I never had anything until the music.” Hokey, maybe, but believable.

Where American Hot Wax leaves off, Allison Anders's 1996 film, Grace of My Heart, starring Illeana Douglas, picks up the story. Denise Waverly tries to make it as a singer in the late fifties, but rock and roll (whoever invented the term) is putting bland white girl singers out of business. Denise starts writing songs for mostly black girl groups and becomes one of the best songwriters in the business.

Grace of My Heart is a film à clef based more specifically on Carole King's life than American Hot Wax.

The joy

Grace of My Heart isn't as good as American Hot Wax. The problem (even though Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach, and Elvis Costello composed songs for the film) is the music. You can imagine the real hits from the sixties that the songs in the movie are meant to evoke, but this just reminds you how much better the originals were.

For some reason every male lead in the movie wears a bad wig. John Turturro, in a role based on Phil Spector, is supposed to have bad hair—it's a running joke. But Eric Stoltz looks ridiculous as a goateed beatnik, and Matt Dillon (good at playing noir victims, as in Crash and Wild Things) was miscast as a surf-music impresario based on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

The hipsters

Denise survives marriage, abortion, divorce, and working on the sixties afternoon television show Where the Action Is. If you were on the verge of teenage when that was on, you remember Dick Clark (the producer) used it to introduce Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Denise finally realizes she wants to sing her own songs and produces the album entitled Grace of My Heart. This was inspired by Carole King's Tapestry in 1971. The songs in the fictional album Grace of My Heart only make you want to hear “So Far Away,” “It's Too Late,” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” from Carole King's Tapestry again.

The truth

American Hot Wax is more real than Grace of My Heart. Crying backstage, knowing her life in music was just starting, Teenage Louise had to give up a little bit of the pure joy of singing on the street in order to succeed in what Alan Freed knew was a business.

Teenage Louise had to grow up. But she could find the joy again if she looked.

"It's great to be young"