Best Keanu and Alex: “You’re not here to back us. We’re here to back you.”

The first Bill and Ted I saw was not either of the originals, but the 2020 sequel, which thankfully doesn’t require much previous knowledge of the franchise to thoroughly enjoy.

And enjoy it I did. We catch up with Bill and Ted 25 years after the last film — the script fudges the dates a bit, an indicator perhaps of how long the third installment was on ice — when they’re living in quasi-joint marriages with the princesses.

An early scene finds both couples in a therapist’s office.

“Ted, is there something your wife needs to hear from you?”

“Yeah, totally. We love you guys.”

“Do you understand how that might sound strange to your wives?”

“No. I mean, we love ’em.”

“It’s the we part.”

Bill and Ted live next door to one another, and their daughters, “Little Bill” and “Little Ted,” now 24, spend their days listening to music, frequently seen with a bag of Cheetos. I can’t tell you how much I loved seeing two women in early adulthood not doing much, except hanging out in a garage plugged into headphones.

When the future comes, and tells Bill and Ted they have to write the song that will unite the world and save reality — like right now — our heroes decide to go into the future where they’ve already written it and steal it from themselves.

To be fair, it seems they’ve been trying to come up with the song for 25 years, the latest version of which is a hilarious experimental piece played in the film’s opening wedding scene, featuring throat singing, bagpipes, trumpet, a steel drum, and theremin.

It’s a terrible song for the newly married couple to dance to, but Little Bill and Little Ted are really into it.

And so Face the Music proceeds, with Bill and Ted visiting progressively older versions of themselves, all of whom of course know they’re coming. When their daughters learn of their predicament, they travel through time to gather up history’s greatest musicians to have a killer band ready when “Dads” come back with the song.

There’s a killer robot — a bad killer robot with a conscience — and we’re treated to Death playing hopscotch. It’s all beautifully enjoyable — the daughters’ deep bow to Louis Armstrong in 1922, Death still bitter about the critics panning his all-bass solo album — and Face the Music supports its crazy plot with real heart.

Bill and Ted are devoted husbands and fathers, gushing when Louis Armstrong tells them they’ve “raised two fine young girls.”

The film at its beautiful heart is about forgiveness, reconciliation, and making peace with your younger self. It’s a thread through the entire movie, so by the end there are no lingering rifts, nothing left to resolve. Because of course if you’re going to unite the world in song, you have to start by reuniting with those closest to you first.

Sometimes the reconciliation in Face the Music is fairly straightforward. At other times it requires a mediator, showing it’s not always easy. And in real life, when you don’t have to unite the world in song, sometimes you have to simply forgive all on your own and let the other person go.

Bill and Ted go far into the future, and talk with “wise old us’s,” who are aged 95 and nearing death. The dialogue reflects what one, in an ideal world, might say to reconcile with a dying parent. But it can also be what you might say to who you once were, when you struggled, made mistakes, but did the best you could given who you were then.

Or, it’s just a cute scene, with younger Keanu and Alex Winter exhaling a classic “Whoa,” when they step into the room and see their older selves.

Because I loved Face the Music, but I don’t want to read too deeply into a Bill and Ted movie. I’ve got the whole Keanu Reeves filmography to bring up old stuff for me — we can let this one just be the silly, heartwarming, entertaining piece of art that it is.

March 2022