Quick movie review: The House of Tomorrow

Asa Butterfield and Alex Wolff in "The House of Tomorrow."

I've seen a lot of movies about punk rock bands and most of them are pretty bad. I don't know why. Maybe punk rock is just something that sounds fun in 2-minute singles but looks juvenile when you train a movie camera on it for too long.  The best ones I've seen in recent years have treated the music itself as an afterthought. I liked the way "Green Room" (2016) used the world of no-budget punk rock touring as a setting for a horror movie. I loved the way the Swedish movie "We are the Best!" (2013) used the formation of a terrible punk band as a rite of passage and self-expression for a small group of adolescent girls.

The 2017 movie "The House of Tomorrow" takes a similar approach, using a punk band as a device for a coming-of-age story. Based on Peter Bognanni's novel of the same name, "The House of Tomorrow" is about Sebastian (Asa Butterfield) a teenager who lives in a geodesic dome house that his grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) keeps as a shrine to the late Buckminster Fuller. Sebastian is home-schooled, and spends much of his day taking care of the dome and giving tours to occasional visitors. 

It's through one of these tour groups that Sebastian meets Jared (Alex Wolff) whose tough punk rock exterior masks his own fear and vulnerability. It turns out he had a heart transplant just six months before, and his health is precarious. Somehow these two become friends and start a punk band. 

Near the end, "The House of Tomorrow" turns into a "Hey, let's put on a show!" movie, but it's really about Sebastian learning to forge his own identity apart from his grandmother and Bucky Fuller, and Jared finding a way to voice his fears without hurting the people he loves. The movie doesn't really have much to say about punk rock, but there is a fun part where Sebastian declares, "Bucky was a punk."