REVIEWED: ROCK SCHOOL TRADITIONAL Traditionalists will see Paul Green's School of Rock Music - a Philadelphia programme which may have inspired Richard Linklater's School of Rock - as forwarding a radical new approach to music education, writes Donald Clarke

But those who fought on the right side of the rock wars in the late 1970s will more likely bristle at Mr Green's reactionary tendencies.

Don Argott's enjoyable documentary on the academy ends with a group of students playing boringly "difficult" progressive rock to a crowd of middle aged Germans at a Frank Zappa convention. For all this has to do with contemporary youth culture, Green may as well as have dressed them in lederhosen and urged them to play oompah music.

No matter. Rock School manages to fit several engaging character studies in between the noodly guitar solos and indulgent drum breaks. There's Will, an articulate pessimist who, bewilderingly, was once misdiagnosed as having a learning disability. We have TJ, a gentle 12-year-old whose adroit guitar playing may well secure him a professional career.

Most fascinating of all is Green himself. Belligerent and dictatorial, the pudding-faced despot has few doubts about his own abilities. "I'm a really good teacher," he says at the film's outset. And, sure enough, the children seem energised - occasionally to the point of rebellion - by his politically incorrect barracking. It is sad to see a music that grew out of opposition being taught in any sort of institution, however chaotic, but one can't help but warm to Green's benevolent ferocity.