By Oliver Meinerding

I first heard Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes" -- featured so prominently in the hit film Juno, as well as its soundtrack and commercials -- at closing time in a bar in Brighton, England. It was September 1972, and the song was just peaking as a Top 10 British hit. My friend and I were on a post-collegiate trip to Europe; the next day we'd be taking the boat to France. It was a high, optimistic time.

What was remarkable was that the entire bar -- all young people -- sang along to the irresistibly catchy chorus as the song played on the jukebox ("All the young dudes/carry the news/boogaloo dudes") as if it was a giddy, generational mandate. And the lead singer Ian Hunter's recorded exhortations ("Hey dudes, where are ya?") seemed to push everyone on. With a voice given to exaggerated enunciation, Hunter sounded a lot like Bob Dylan. And "Dudes" and the impact it was having in this bar struck me like a new, anthemic "Like a Rolling Stone" for the 1970s.

I believe someone mentioned at the time the song was written by David Bowie, then at the height of his "Ziggy Stardust" popularity, and was given to Mott to stop the band from breaking up. Great, inspiring back-story -- it made the song an act of Rock & Roll defiance.

It turned out to be a long trip to Europe. By the time I returned to Cincinnati (and then moved to Boston) and caught up with music, "Dudes" had peaked as an almost-hit in the U.S. Like Mott the Hoople themselves, it never really broke through here in its time. Too idiosyncratic, hindsight says. But I got the album and spent a lot of time listening.

The flip side of "Dudes" -- the part that has made it have a far greater, more long-lasting cultural impact than, say, a bigger Rock hit of the era, "Smokin' in the Boy's Room" -- emerged. It's only accidentally anthemic. In reality, it has a preternatural melancholy, filled with intimations of mortality.

The melody, propelled by an elegiac introductory guitar line, struggles between minor- and major-key. The "young" in the title isn't so much celebration as a warning, a sigh about what will soon be lost. And the lyrics are spooky and foreboding in their novelistic, confessional detail about shattered dreams: "Well Billy rapped all night about his suicide/How he kicked it in the head when he was 25/Speed jive/Don't want to stay alive/When you're 25."

And this: "And my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones/We never got it off on that revolution stuff/What a drag; too many snags."

In Juno, screenwriter Diabo Cody seems to get all this. Most of the film's songs, provided by alt-folkie Kimya Dawson, speak to the main character's world -- naively weird, smart, charming, outsiderish in a loveable if slightly troubling way.

But there are a couple of exceptions, most notably "Dudes." There is a quietly seductive dance -- figuratively speaking -- going on in the film between Juno (Ellen Page) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), the yuppieish older man who, with his wife (Jennifer Garner), has promised to adopt her unplanned, unborn child.

He should be a father figure. Only Mark is hard to read -- he relates a little too closely to Juno's hip youthfulness, especially her interest in alternative arts. He tries to teach her what she missed, and maybe he wishes he was her (without the pregnancy, of course). A musician who now writes jingles, he used to be in a band that opened for The Melvins. Juno taunts him with that information. He's a sell-out, she implies.

But "Dudes" serves as a common ground when they hear it at his house, a still-contemporary sounding old song they both can instantly relate to and admire. For a moment, it prompts emotional intimacy.

And that compels Mark to reveal a shocking secret that changes everything and reveals him to be that "young dude" who hasn't quite lived up to his desires.

It's clear Cody hears the melancholy behind the song's swagger and wrote a character who embodies the "paradise lost" that writer Bowie and singer Hunter intimated way back in 1972. In creating Mark, she tried to "carry the news" to a new generation just now discovering a song whose impact hasn't dated. That's why Juno is more than just a teen comedy and maybe why its appeal is intergenerational. ©