'Vinyl' Review: You Can't Always Get What You Want

Music has always been an animating energy in the cinema of Martin Scorsese, and he is of the age (he’s now 73) to have grown up alongside the evolution of rock & roll. This gives his new HBO series Vinyl, premiering Sunday, the weight of birthright: He can claim this music — from Chuck Berry on through to punk, disco, and rap-which-became-hiphop — as art experienced first-hand, up-close and personal, and has made artful use of it starting with his first major film, 1973’s Mean Streets. Scorsese didn’t need to enlist Mick Jagger as one of the show’s co-creators for added credibility — if anything, Scorsese’s ear for the variety of music necessary to mount a panoramic drama of this industry in the 1970s is even better (more objective, if you will) than Jagger’s, whose Rolling Stones spent that decade contortedly reacting to and against punk/disco/rap. 

Vinyl tells the story of Richie Finestra, played by Bobby Cannavale in full, motor-mouthed glory, his every entrance into a room a brash, Saturday Night Fever stride. Richie is a music-lover whose tragic flaw is to have made his love his business: When we meet him he’s become what we used to call a “bizzer,” and not a very good one: He presides over his own label, American Century, which as the series begins is in dreadful financial shape. So is Richie: He’s starting a downward spiral into the coke-and-booze benders he’d sworn off to please his wife, Devon (Olivia Wilde), and his young family, tucked away from some of the music-biz madness in a Connecticut suburb.