Breaking into the music business isn't easy, and once you get in there it's like swimming with a school of sharks. So you've got to have that killer instinct to survive, and that's exactly what Nicholas Hoult has in Kill Your Friends, a murderous music industry flick set in the '90s Cool Britannia period that yielded groups like the Spice Girls, Radiohead, The Verve and others.
Directed by Owen Harris (Black Mirror) and co-starring James Corden, Craig Roberts, Ed Skrein, and Jjim Piddock, the film stars Hoult as a young A&R man who goes to deadly lengths to secure his latest hit. Here's the synopsis:
London, 1997; the British music industry is on a winning streak. Britpop bands Blur, Oasis, Radiohead rule the airwaves and Cool Britannia is in full swing. 27-year-old hit chasing A&R man Steven Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music business, a world where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public. In an industry of dream-makers, Stelfox refuses to buy into the ‘dream’ – and despises anyone that does. Fueled by greed, ambition and inhuman quantities of drugs, Stelfox searches for his next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification. Created by an industry that demands success at any price, Stelfox takes the concept of ‘killer tunes’ to a murderous new level in a desperate attempt to salvage his career. Balanced against the backdrop of the music business and its characters, Stelfox is the ultimate anti-hero: chronically sexist, racist, and everything else-ist.
Kill Your Friends hits theaters and VOD on April 1st.
