Air Guitar in Oulu

Sweet dreamer is a breath of fresh air

globeandmail.com – by JOHN DOYLE

We have some kind of crazies in Canada. We have daft dreamers and obsessives who are, thankfully, benign. They make great fodder for droll documentaries that illuminate the sweet eccentricity of this country.

The best program airing this weekend is one such story.

Air Guitar in Oulu (Saturday, Bravo!, 7:30 p.m.) is a lovely and hilarious portrait of a seemingly dimwitted dreamer. Andrew Buckles is the kind of guy who is, in many ways, the backbone of this country. He looks like he’s been plucked from a beer commercial — in his shorts, plaid shirt and bandanna, he’s the kind of guy whose main interests are avoiding hassles and having a good time. It turns out that his passion is air guitar.

Andrew has a dream: to travel to Oulu, a town in Finland, way up near the Arctic Circle, where they hold the World Air Guitar Championships. Of course, Andrew doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, so he’s obliged to use his wits, such as they are, to raise the money and fulfill his dream.

The documentary — made with deft wit by Kent Sobey — starts in Vancouver, where Andrew isn’t doing much, except playing air guitar and dreaming of Finland. So he goes home to Halifax, where, he believes, his dream will be better understood. On his way there, he tells us about his brother Kevin. You see, Kevin was once known as a great man for thumb wrestling, so he might grasp Andrew’s aspirations in the air guitar field. It turns out that Kevin is a tad skeptical. We see Andrew and Kevin sitting around having a few beers at Kevin’s place. Kevin’s dubious about this air guitar thing.

Andrew gets a job pulling a rickshaw around Halifax for tourists. He’s terrible at it, finding it particularly difficult to stop the rickshaw without killing himself and his passengers. He also holds bake sales to raise funds. Sometimes he busks. That means standing on the street with a boom-box blaring music while he does his air guitar thing. People complain and a couple of bemused cops arrive and tell him to quit bothering people.

Meanwhile, Kevin is a tad embarrassed by Andrew. We see him sitting in his garden at a table covered with empty beer cans, having a smoke. “When other people see Andrew playing air guitar, they see a knob,” he says. A few beers later he tells the production crew, “I think you guys are validating this whole process and I think it’s retarded. It’s stupid!”

Andrew takes dance lessons and tries to raise money to go to Finland, but he’s getting nowhere. So he sells his uncle’s prized record collection — he inherited it — and with a few hundred bucks in his pocket, he’s on his way.

What happens in Oulu is priceless. We meet “Super Dave,” the Australian air-guitar champion, and Toby, the seriously stoned New Zealand champ. Andrew fits right in. The air-guitar community, as it is called, is a wonderful group of people. Their training camp has to be seen to be believed. At a press conference, Andrew tells the media: “It’s wonderful learning from the best. It’s really special to be amongst people who really understand me and not amongst people that are kind of making fun of me and laughing at me.”

I won’t tell you what happens in the end. Just watch this marvellous story — in the great tradition of Project Grizzly and Cyberman — and learn that air guitar is a beautiful thing.