Last night we got to see the documentary some friends have been making. The reception was doubly fun as I got to spend quality time with Former Coworker Who Was Not My Boyfriend and other folks I haven’t seen in ages and ages. Plus, good DJ. I might be slightly biased about that, though.

As if writer/director/editor Shauna Lawhorne wasn’t over the moon from the reception the film received last night, she got several column inches in the “names and faces” column in today’s Washington Post:

Ambassador, musician and now documentary film star. You make us look bad, Andras.

The Hungarian ambassador to the United States, Andras Simonyi , and his band mates — Alexander Vershbow , U.S. ambassador to South Korea; Lincoln Bloomfield, former assistant secretary of state; and Dan Poneman, former assistant to the president — are the focus of a new documentary, “Rockin’ the Beltway,” that was screened at the Hungarian Embassy last night.

The flick follows the guitar-plucking ambassador and his crew, known as the Coalition of the Willing, with commentary from music notables such as Tommy Ramone (he’s a fan) and Chuck Young of Rolling Stone magazine (he doesn’t like the band’s name).

“The ultimate goal [of the film] is to make people see that you can be a serious diplomat or security expert and play music very seriously,” Simonyi, 54, told us yesterday. “It really is the story of rock-and-roll and how it affected our generation.”

The Coalition of the Willing performs fairly regularly in Washington — most recently at the 9:30 club and Walter Reed Army Medical Center — and elsewhere around the country for charity events. “Whenever we do a concert, we want it to be a serious event and a major fundraiser for a good cause,” Simonyi said.

First-time director Shauna Lawthorne , a production associate for a D.C. film company and a graduate student at American University, was roped into the project by a friend, Simonyi’s daughter, Sonja . “I said, ‘Your dad’s an ambassador?! He has a band?!’ ” she recalled. “I thought it was an interesting and entertaining story.”

Simonyi has lofty ambitions for the film: “I hope TV stations pick it up because it’s a great story about how different diplomacy and political life has become in the past few years.” Like an E! True Hollywood story?

It’s a very good film and I’m hoping very much they can get all the clearances they need as painlessly as possible so that they can show it in public – it’s a good story, well-told.