← All Movies

Leto

The film is mainly set in the summer of 1981 in Leningrad. The main storyline of the film tells the story of the relationship between the 19-year-old Viktor Tsoi (Teo Yoo), 26-year-old Mike Naumenko (Roman Bilyk), and Naumenko's girlfriend Natalia (Irina Starshenbaum), as well as the formation of the Leningrad Rock Club and the recording of Kino 's first album, 45.

The film's setting, the Leningrad Rock Club, was one of the few state-permitted public performance spaces for rock musicians in its time. The Club is generally a theatrical venue for boundary-pushing music, where audiences are instructed to sit politely and listen rather than mosh. However, interjections by narrator Skeptic (Alexander Kuznetsov) occasionally recast the club as extravagant, hedonistic, reckless, and dangerous. The musicians live frugally; their indulgences are creative rather than material.

Much of the narrative focuses on Mike, the frontman of one of the Club's more popular, old-guard bands, and his girlfriend Natacha, whose close, initially monogamous relationship stands in contrast to the expected behavior of rockstars. Also significant to the plot is Viktor, a quiet, slightly otherworldly young man with a knack for melody and a beguilingly peculiar turn of lyrical phrase. Natacha is the first to notice a kind of melancholic magic about Viktor, as the film gradually reorients itself around his budding stardom rather than Mike's less obviously ascending career. However, the film maintains a more general look at the musicians in the club, including the various musicians who come in and out of the lives of the protagonists.

The film's musical numbers alternate between diegetic stage performances and sudden flights of music-video fancy. In one such performance, an altercation between musicians and more conservative citizens on a packed train escalates into a demented, carriage-traversing singalong of Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," the hitherto realist imagery disrupted with early-MTV-style cartoon flourishes. There are a few sequences in which Mike and the other Leningrad rockers seize their moment, using their music to defy the bureaucrats and wow audiences. However, nearly all of these scenes all followed by a caveat to the effect of "this didn’t really happen."