Instead of real-world consequences for his criminal acts, though, both films find absurdly contrived ways of glossing over the whole subject. In both films the protagonist is exposed as a fraud, and departs in disgrace.( School of Rock also has a secondary uptight female character who is not an authority figure per se, namely, the girlfriend of the hero’s roomate.) In The School of Rock, this is the school principal played by Joan Cusack in The Fighting Temptations, it’s the church treasurer played by LaTanya Richardson. Both films pit the hero against a suspicious, uptight woman in a position of authority who is a stickler for rules and is intimidating to others.In both The School of Rock and The Fighting Temptations, the protagonist is a charlatan musical director - a man who, having lost his main gig in life, finds an unexpected opportunity for financial gain by pretending to have credentials he doesn’t have, and who devotes himself to trying to cobble together an unlikely musical act from inauspicious beginnings and lead it to competition glory.( Note: Spoilers ahead.) The comparisons are striking: More interesting than the film, perhaps, are the comparisons and contrasts to another current music-themed hit comedy, one being marketed to churchgoing audiences: The Fighting Temptations, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Then there’s the swishing, lisping fifth-grade 'band stylist' bringing 'Queer Eye' camp to the grade-school setting. Rock culture’s darker side is whitewashed (it’s not about drugs, kids, and groupies are really just band cheerleaders!), and subjects other than music (and even music other than rock) get short shrift. The hero’s nearly religious reverence for rock’s angry posturing and anti-authoritarianism - reverence culminating in a pre-concert prayer to the 'God of rock' - isn’t quite condoned, but isn’t put in any larger context either.

School of rock full movie