Jumping around on stage in time with the music? This isn't Dancing with the Stars, it's Air Guitar Nation, a fun documentary about an absurd hobby that makes for an even more absurd international competition.

Air guitar is, of course, the post-pubescent tendency to wave one's arms as if one is playing a real guitar, in time to a background track: The harder the music rocks, the better. And while air guitarists can fake it, most will readily admit they have no actual ability to play a real guitar.

How then do you make a competition out of air guitar? The same way you make one out of karaoke and lip syncing competitions (Remember 1980s TV staple Puttin' on the Hits?): You get judges to award points based on style and outrageousness. And so we are introduced to the Air Guitar World Championships, which models its scoring system on figure skating, with 6 points the best score, and invites a cavalcade of curiously-dressed thrashers to strut their stuff on stage in time with rock's greatest hits. Truth be told, air guitaring actually has little to do with who wins: Contests seem to be decided based on costumes, acrobatics, and how injured one gets in the course of his performance. (Yes, this is a predominantly male passion, though a few women to appear on stage from time to time.)

In what has become a typical format of quirky sports and "non-sports" documentaries, the film follows two Americans, David "C-Diddy" Jung and Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane, as they try to make it to world champion. C-Diddy, an Asian goofball who wears a Hello Kitty backpack as a breastplate, uses a real crowd-pleaser, Extreme's "Play With Me," to devastating effect, handily winning most of the competitions he enters. Bjorn is a more traditional rocker, prone to shirt-tearing and offering a more Pete Townshend/Jimi Hendrix/Clash-inspired performance, but his earnestness and sweaty, headband-wearing gumption often nets him a close second. Who'll make it to Finland to compete? And who'll win?

Much of Air Guitar Nation revolves around the minutiae of these two men's lives (both are pretty normal out of character) as well as what goes into making an air guitar amateur into a pro: There's even an air guitar boot camp, which seems like it would have to be completely fabricated... and yet it's apparently the real thing.

As always, the rivalries among the contestants have to be juicy enough to create drama, and while Nation may be light in that department (these guys are awfully cordial), it's hard not to agree that the air guitar competitions do indeed rock. While ESPN2 may never air this stuff, even late at night, it's a fun enough goof to give it 90 minutes of your time as a feature film.

The DVD adds about half an hour of deleted scenes to the mix.



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