iLifestyle Critic’s choice: The best of the new movies to stream this week

The High Note (Amazon Prime, Sky Store, YouTube On Demand) Diana Ross’s daughter stars in a plotless drama that is oddly entertaining despite the tunes lacking that X factor, writes Paul Whitington

Pity the poor multimillionaire pop star forced to live in fivestar splendour and perform lucrative, but numbingly samey, greatest hits shows for adoring fans. This is the fate with which we are expected to sympathise in The High Note, an odd little film which is part romcom, part love story, part weird, plotless musical. It has its flaws and trades shamelessly in clichés and stereotypes, but is not without a certain ragged charm and actually manages to be funny now and then. Oddly enough, it also entertained me.

The Emmy-festooned star at the centre of it all is Grace Davis (played by Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross), a legendary pop diva whose live act is still in big demand but hasn’t recorded an original song for 10 years. This creative paralysis troubles Grace’s personal assistant Maggie Sherwood (Dakota Johnson), an efficient, organised and intelligent young woman who dreams of becoming a producer.

Grace’s long-time manager Jack Robertson (Ice Cube) reckons she should count her blessings and stay on the gravy train, which will shortly be leaving for Las Vegas and a years-long residency at a top club. Maggie, though, is convinced Vegas will be the last nail in the gilded coffin of a once-glittering career.

Grace, she believes, still has greatness in her and to that end, Maggie has secretly been tinkering with the production of a new live album. And while Jack is furious when he finds out, Grace realises young Maggie has talent, and orders the record company to go with her cut.

Maggie’s next big plan is to persuade Grace to record a new album of original songs with her producing, but that won’t be easy and, meanwhile, the young would-be mogul has come across another talented singer. David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr) also lives in fine style in a palatial pad overlooking Los Angeles, but the source of his wealth is a mystery. He appears to have no job and performs his music with friends and in obscure clubs.

‘I’m gonna make you a star,’ Maggie thinks but does not say, and is economical with the truth regarding her experience (she has none) when she offers to produce his upcoming album. But soon they’ve hit it off, and music is not the only thing on David’s mind as he gazes earnestly at the mixing desk where Maggie is weaving her magic.

I say magic, but most of the music on display in The High Note is the kind of soggy, anodyne, over-produced Californian ‘soul’ you’d complain to the management about if they played it in your hotel lift. I’m not sure whose fault this is, though one Amie Doherty admits responsibility for the film’s music, and Tracee Ellis Ross can claim ownership of the song ‘Love Myself’, which has been optimistically released as a single.

This thoroughly forgettable soundtrack creates a problem for the film: we’re constantly being told that Grace Davis is a soul legend, and she would certainly appear to have made a fortune out of her music, but every time you hear it, you can’t help wondering if they’re having a laugh. A couple of moments in the film that should have been dramatic high points fall flat because of the drab and sentimental songs sung during the course of them. Comically, however, The High Note fares better.

As is obligatory in this kind of film, Maggie comes armed with a funny flatmate (Zoe Chao), who actually says some very amusing things as she’s coming

‘Most of the music on display is the kind of soggy, anodyne, over-produced Californian “soul” you’d complain to the management about if they played it in your hotel lift’

and going if you listen hard enough. As one would expect from the daughter of Diana Ross, Ellis Ross does a pretty good impression of a high-handed diva, and at one point, dresses down the uppity Maggie by reminding her that she’s paid to “pick peanuts out of my kung-pow chicken”. And when Maggie questions the percussive abilities of David’s drummer, the singer angrily demurs. “That’s my friend,” he insists. “Is he?” Maggie wonders mischievously.

Can Dakota Johnson act? I’ve never quite been able to decide. She never seems entirely engaged by any film she’s in, and may have low blood pressure, or an unnatural surfeit of calm. Somehow, her rather vacant style serves The

High Note well and she wafts stylishly through it like one of those freshly showered women in conditioner ads.

When she turns left and right, one gets jolting flashbacks to the low culture of the 1980s: her mother, Melanie Griffiths, was a mid-ranking Hollywood actress, her father Don Johnson the swaggering star of Miami

Vice.

Dakota’s most famous role to date has been in the Fifty Shades films, and she cannot be blamed for their egregious awfulness. If passion isn’t her thing, maybe light comedy is, and despite a ludicrous late twist, The High

Note is pleasantly watchable thanks in large part to her.