Empire Records

"Empire Records" made $293,000 in its opening weekend against a $10 million budget. Warner Bros. pulled it from wide release almost immediately and shuffled it off to cable, where it quietly became one of the most-watched films of the late 1990s. It has a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics in 1995 called it shallow, formulaic, Singles knockoff without the music. Those critics were dead wrong and the audience who wore out their VHS copies of Empire Records agree with me.

You may think "Empire Records" doesn’t need defending because it already has its devoted following. That’s exactly the problem. “Cult Classic” is the label Hollywood puts on films it abandoned that turned out to be good anyway. It’s an odd consolation prize. It lets the industry off the hook while simultaneously capping the film’s reputation at a certain ceiling. While it is beloved by its people, it is invisible to everyone else. Empire Records deserves the ceiling removed.

The premise is that an independent record store in some unnamed city has one day to save itself from being absorbed by a corporate chain. The staff is a collection of young misfits. We have a compulsive gambler, a girl in crisis, a burnout philosopher, a young woman with boundary issues around a washed-up pop star, among others. Over the course of the film they cycle through chaos, confrontation, collapse and something that looks a lot like grace. In other words, it’s a film about what it feels like to be twenty and terrified that the world you love is about to be replaced by something cheaper and worse.

The villain here is not a person. That’s the first thing critics missed. Mitch, the regional manager from MusicTown, isn’t necessarily evil. He’s a guy doing his job, absorbing Empire Records into a chain that will stock fewer records, pay lower wages and remove any touches that make the place matter. The film never gives him a monologue about greed and it doesn’t need it. Most movies give you a villain you can’t wait to see defeated. "Empire Records" gives you one who makes a business case that you almost can’t argue with, but it doesn’t mean that Mitch isn’t a smarmy dick.

What the film does instead is build an ensemble that actually functions like one. Liv Tyler, in an early role that doesn’t get enough credit, brings a quiet inferiority to Corey that makes it different from other versions of this character in cinema. Renee Zellweger is doing something genuinely funny and oddly touching as Gina, navigating a one-scene emotional range with confidence and command of the screen. Ethan Embry as Mark is a mix of comic relief and a reflection of the film’s warmth. In the middle of all of it, Anthony LaPaglia as Joe holds the whole thing together with a performance that is sort of all over the place but very fun at the same time.

Rory Cochrane as the employee who steals petty cash and loses it all in a single night of Atlantic City gambling, then spends the day facing everyone he’s wronged with extraordinary calm, is the film’s philosophical center. Cochrane plays him in a register that 1995 critics read as blank and wooden. He is not blank. He is watching this crazy day unfold and doing some pretty great acting just with his eyes. It’s subtle and smart and most viewers just miss that aspect.

How can we talk about a movie that takes place in a record store without at least briefly discussing the soundtrack? It seems like a CD that your and most of your friends probably owned. One of the most underrated songs of the 90’s, Plowed by Sponge, is a perfect needle drop for wonderful 90’s movie montage (we have an entire article dedicated to it). It’s impossible to not get pumped up during that song. Additional tracks are supplied by an eclectic lineup of artists like The Cranberries, AC/DC, the Buggles, Cracker, Dire Straits, Gin Blossoms and, of course, Ass Ponies.

"Empire Records" gets talked about as a guilty pleasure, as a 90s time capsule, as the one with Rex Manning Day. What it almost never gets called is a film that understood something true about community and belonging and the particular grief of watching something real get replaced by something corporate. It also made it funny, warm and alive.

The finale is not about the store being saved. It’s about twenty-somethings discovering that the people standing next to them in a crisis are the point. Not the building, not the records and not the thing they thought they were fighting for. That’s something great films do.

Forget the Rotten Tomatoes score and forget the opening weekend and forget the phrase “cult classic.” Give this one another watch. "Empire Records" deserves better than a Rex Manning Day meme every April 8th. It’s secretly one of the best films of the 90s about what it is to care deeply about something.

---

Been a Rex Manning Day devotee since the 90s, or did we just give you language for something you’ve always felt but never quite argued? Either way — drop your take below. And if there’s another mid-90s film that deserves this treatment, we want to hear it.