Careers on each side of the curve
Aside from its other virtues, “The High Note” feels like a real movie. It’s made on a fairly large scale, with wellknown people and by a director with a track record. It wouldn’t have been a big release, but a moderate-size deal at the movie theaters, even without the pandemic, so it’s good to see movies like this getting released, even if only to streaming services.
The film is directed by Nisha Ganatra, and like her previous film “Late Night,” starring Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson, this is another story about two women: an older, jaded superstar and an ambitious underling.
Dakota Johnson (“50 Shades of Gray”) plays Maggie, the personal assistant to a legendary pop diva played by Tracee Ellis Ross (“Blackish”). How legendary? As enormous as can be imagined. Like Madonna, like Diana Ross (Tracee’s reallife mom) — someone so huge that relaxing around her isn’t really possible. A celebrity so big that there’s always a voice in the back of your mind thinking, “Wow. That is actually her. And she is talking to
Often the people most obsessed with stardom are the stars themselves, and “The High Note” captures the atmosphere that such a star creates around her. In this, Ross’ performance as the great Grace Davis is perceptive. Even when she’s confiding, even when she’s laughing, even when she’s drunk, she remains aloof. She maintains her assumption of superiority. She holds on to her power.
So, when Maggie tells friends that she and the superstar are “like this,” we think, “No, you’re not. She’s your boss. She’s not your friend.”
The story begins at a critical point in the careers of both women. Grace hasn’t made a new album in nine years and is looking down the barrel of 50. She has an offer to become a Las Vegas headliner, which means stability and riches, but also artistic stagnation, the prospect of performing a fossilized version of her act forever. Or she can be an artist and risk failure. Actually, the movie is fairly skillful in presenting this as a stark choice, when she could actually do both — make a new album and, if it bombs, go to Vegas.
Maggie’s situation, more acute, is the main focus of the movie. She wants to become a record producer, and she’s getting to the age where something has to happen soon. If successful, she’d be a very young producer. In the meantime, she is an aging gofer.
Johnson, with her airy yet focused quality, makes it easy for us to believe that Maggie can hear things that others don’t, that she’s an artist. She discovers a singer (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and starts recording with him, and there are some good scenes in the studio, in which we test our ears against the characters’ and decide what’s good and what isn’t.
As a huge star, Grace lives in a world in which everyone wants something from her: money, a pathway to success, gifts or simply the vicarious excitement of being in a famous person’s orbit. Ross internalizes that reality and makes us feel that this has been Grace’s life for decades. Her whole manner suggests a cordial but deliberate distance from the desires of every other person. It doesn’t look any fun to be Grace, but it looks even worse to be around her.
Ice Cube is strong in an uncharacteristic role as Maggie’s stern but exhausted agent. When she tours, he tours with her. The idea of camping out in Vegas in a long and lucrative semiretirement seems, to him, the culmination of a lifetime of labor.
“The High Note” begins well, ends well and even has a good middle, but there’s one extra plot turn, about 15 minutes before the finish, that’s one too many. It doesn’t spoil the movie, but it adds an unwelcome touch of sentimentality into a story that is otherwise fairly tough throughout.