Wannabe: All Washed Up

A past-his-prime actor, who never really had a prime to begin with, tries to make a comeback in a film about his life, while a documentary is made about the filming of that film, with him as the star. Makes perfect sense, right?

So, Steve Williams (Young) started his celebrity career way back in the 90’s in a British boy band called, The Bus Boyz. Tragically, their tour bus crashed, killing three members of the band and leaving only Steve and his best friend Paul (Huss) alive to keep on kicking. In the mid-naughties, Steve’s star rose again as a documentary was made about him trying to get a new life in LA as an actor, where he was reintroduced to Paul, and anyone watching(!) got introduced to a roster of new characters who inhabited Steve’s life. Now, in the post-covid era, Steve is at it again, with another documentary somehow getting made about him as he still bumbles about trying to get acting gigs in Hollywood.

The idea is that we’re watching a mockumentary of the behind-the-scenes scenarios that happen in the backrooms of LA, where dodgy deals are made, shaky funding is promised, vacuous conversations replace real words, and smoke is blown up a plethora of asses. We see the bottom of the pile in empty theatres and questionable productions, and sit with big-wig producers as talking heads, as they tell us about the industry and Steve’s potential within it. The previous documentary made about Steve Williams was called Wannabe (2005) and so here we are catching up with him twenty years later in the sequel, Wannabe: All Washed Up.

Sold as ‘The Disaster Artist without the artist’, and coming from an idea about ‘how funny it might be to make a sequel to a film that nobody has ever seen’, it’s amazing that writer/director, Richard Keith, and writer/star, Craig Robert Young, are so aware of their creations and their non-success and yet still decided to make this film. They are right, in that nobody has seen Wannabe, and so anybody walking into this one has no idea about the characters and the backstory that are being presented to us and that we’re supposed to be invested in for an hour-and-a-half. The natural style of the documentary doesn’t do them any favours either as everything just runs quickly and easily for everyone in the frame, as though it’s their everyday lives, but for us in the audience we’re left with a bunch of people we don’t know talking crap over one another.

A quick ten-minutes of the first film helps lead us into this one, but it’s all a little mix-ed up in terms of narrative and what we get to see, with there being callbacks later on to these particular incidents for those who are paying attention. The rest of the comedy is bare and overly obvious, with hardly a smile to be raised at any point as we’re supposed to laugh at people who don’t know they’re saying stupid things, in true rockumentary style. Mostly it’s easy to see where the jokes are, but they never land, with a lot of the humour coming from continuously mixed metaphors and inanely banal aphorisms spouted by the characters, or alternatively, from shock-value embarrassments which paint the characters in a bad light. It’s all very derivative and tedious.

However, in the end, in the final twenty-minutes, things do come together, and the characters do all find their arcs, and we see the lives and relationships they have been living along the way, and the humour does improve, almost to the point of laughing, and it seems there was a point and a vision all along – which is nice, for them. It’s the fact that Wannabe: All Washed Up will mean something to some people that stops it from being an out and out ‘disaster’, and that your time isn’t entirely wasted with these characters when there’s an investment from the filmmakers that they truly feel is strong enough to share, even if it is ninety-minutes of our lives that we’ll never get back.

It’s a shame that you have to go through the first seventy minutes of Wannabe: All Washed Up to get to anything good, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to have watched the first one, too, but if you’re a fan, I guess what you’re getting is more of the same, just with what I suspect is a more grown-up outlook. You can’t fault the effort and commitment that’s gone into the Wannabe franchise, but it seems that the answer to whether it’s funny to have a sequel to a film that nobody saw, is that you’ll just end up with two films that nobody will see.

Wannabe: All Washed Up releases in the UK on June 19th 2026.