We Are Your Friends (2015)
Directed by Max Joseph
No — We Are Your Friends is not woke, scoring 11 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Max Joseph's We Are Your Friends arrives from 2015, that brief window when the San Fernando Valley could still be sold to audiences as a land of opportunity.
Consciousness Markers
The Paige Morrell real-estate subplot explicitly depicts predatory foreclosure-flipping and renting homes back to displaced owners at a profit, which visibly angers Cole and carries a mild eat-the-rich critique.
The principal cast is overwhelmingly white (Efron, Bentley, Ratajkowski, Weston, Fernandez, Shaffer), with only minor supporting players of color such as the foreclosure victim Tanya Romero; no deliberate diversity push is evident.
Sophie is given a backstory of sexual exploitation and a moment of being defended by Cole, but she remains chiefly a love-interest object in a male coming-of-age triangle; no feminist framework is advanced.
The film gestures at themes of artistic authenticity and the exploitation of the vulnerable, but delivers them through plot rather than preachy monologue; the moralizing is light.
The Tanya Romero foreclosure subplot touches a Latina homeowner, but the film frames it purely as an ethics-of-capitalism issue rather than a racial one.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
Squirrel is described as 'gifted with math,' which is a character trait, not a depiction of neurodivergence.
The film is a contemporary fictional story with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
Max Joseph's We Are Your Friends arrives from 2015, that brief window when the San Fernando Valley could still be sold to audiences as a land of opportunity. Zac Efron plays Cole Carter, a 23-year-old DJ who wants to make one great track and, failing that, at least to escape his friends' various dead ends. The film's cultural inventory is thin. The principal cast is white, the romantic geometry is a triangle, and the emotional stakes are a mentorship and a girl. No one in this Valley worries about the climate. No one discusses their pronouns. The film is content to be about ambition, friendship, and the price of a decent pair of headphones.
There is one flicker of social conscience, and it concerns real estate. Cole and his friends take work with Paige Morrell, who flips foreclosed homes and rents them back to the people she has just displaced. When Tanya Romero loses her house and immediately becomes a tenant in it, the film registers the outrage plainly, and Cole takes the money anyway. It is an eat-the-rich gesture of the mildest sort, framed as a matter of personal ethics instead of anything structural, and never once racialized. Sophie, played by Emily Ratajkowski, is granted a backstory of sexual humiliation and a moment of gallant defense, then returned to the shelf as the object of two men's disagreement. The gesture is noted. The framework is not.
The film offers a beat instead of a thesis. The moralizing is light and arrives through plot, which is to say someone dies of an overdose and someone else has an epiphany about recording the sound of his own sneakers on gravel. There is no sermon, no lecture, no closing title card instructing us how to vote. Squirrel is good at math, which makes him good at math. That is the whole of it. As a document of 2015's progressive imagination, the film is nearly a blank page, and as a movie it is a mediocre one. It grossed eleven million dollars. The Adidas shoebox gets the last word.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Young Cole Carter dreams of hitting the big time as a Hollywood disc jockey, spending his days and nights hanging with buddies and working on the one track that will set the world on fire. Opportunity comes knocking when he meets James Reed, a charismatic DJ who takes the 23-year-old under his wing. Soon, his seemingly clear path to success gets complicated when he starts falling for his mentor's girlfriend, jeopardizing his new friendship and the future he seems destined to fulfill.
Questions about We Are Your Friends
Is We Are Your Friends woke?
No — We Are Your Friends is not woke, scoring 11 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does We Are Your Friends have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Eat the Rich (30). On Eat the Rich: The Paige Morrell real-estate subplot explicitly depicts predatory foreclosure-flipping and renting homes back to displaced owners at a profit, which visibly angers Cole and carries a mild eat-the-rich critique.
How does We Are Your Friends compare to other 2015 movies?
It ranks #136 of the 289 films from 2015 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Chi-Raq (78).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.