Rock flick doesn’t follow usual routine
Hearts Beat Loud
(out of 4) Starring Nick Offerman, Kiersey Clemons, Toni Collette, Sasha Lane, Ted Danson and Blythe Danner. Directed by Brett Haley. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 97 minutes. PG The let’s-make-a-band movie has long been a cinema staple fusing comedy and drama, with forebears including One, The
Commitments and That Thing You Do! Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat
Loud agreeably changes it up a bit, by making the actual band formation more of a subplot, going so far as to ironically give the central father-daughter duo the handle We’re Not a Band. The film instead foregrounds the multiple relationships within it, but it crucially doesn’t forget about the music.
Picture an older version of John Cusack’s list-obsessed record store owner in High
Fidelity, a guy whose cynical worldview has mellowed into something approaching resigned indifference.
This helps describe Nick Offerman’s Frank Fisher, the widowed and grieving father of twentysomething Sam (Kiersey Clemons, Dope). They’re at a different set of life crossroads: Frank is in danger of losing his failing Brooklyn record shop; Sam is preparing to move west to study medicine at college.
Frank’s boyish response to stress is to conscript Sam for one of their “jam seshes,” a father-daughter bonding ritual that he loves but that she’s grown out of, even though they sound great together. He’s a onetime professional guitarist and drummer; she’s a talented singer and songwriter.
One such session yields an uptempo love ballad they call “Hearts Beat Loud,” which grabs multiple ears when Frank impulsively uploads it to Spotify. Suddenly, they’re getting performance and recording offers, much to Sam’s chagrin. This could threaten her college plans.
Writer/director Haley and cowriter Marc Basch don’t follow the usual routine of sending fledgling rock stars out on the road and into hijinks. They instead concentrate on the complicated relationships, which include Frank’s potential romance with his friendly landlady Leslie (Toni Collette) and Sam’s sexual awakening with her new girlfriend Rose ( Amer
ican Honey’s Sasha Lane). At times, Hearts Beat Loud seems destined to stray a little too far from the norm, with tangential entanglements involving Frank’s dementia-afflicted mom (Blythe Danner) and his Woodstock-reliving bartender pal (Ted Danson).
The music pulls it all together. Haley summons Keegan DeWitt, the composer behind his 2017 triumph The Hero, to supply not only the buoyant score but also several tunes, the title one among them, that make Offerman and Clemons sound like a credible duo. This is a movie you not only want to see, but also to put on the turntable. Peter Howell