Love, unplugged
With music as a backdrop and some terrifically funny writing, ‘Juliet, Naked’ offers enjoyable romance
The setup is so good — and the one-liners so punchy — that it’s hard to be too disappointed that the love story at the heart of “Juliet, Naked” is rather pedestrian.
Adapted from the 2009 Nick Hornby novel of the same name, “Juliet, Naked” ultimately is about two people finding a connection in the middle of their lives. Both Rose Byrne’s Annie and Ethan Hawke’s Tucker are frustrated by what may have been a number of years wasted on the wrong people — and on the wrong priorities.
It’s the dressings around this romantic dramedy that make it so fun. As the story begins, Annie is living in England with Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a college professor who spends his free time obsessing over Tucker Crowe, an American singer-songwriter who, years ago and at the height of his relative fame, quit a show halfway through it and hasn’t been heard from since.
We are introduced to Duncan in the film’s opening moments as he records a video for his YouTube channel devoted to Tucker, complaining that the album that means so much to him, “Juliet,” was ranked only 43 on Rolling Stone’s list of heartbreak albums. That’s a “joke,” he insists with real indignation.
Duncan also oversees and writes for an online forum focused on Tucker, much of its attention showered on “Juliet.”
How key is Duncan’s love of Tucker to his identity? When Annie’s lesbian sister, Ros (Lily Brazier), brings a girl to dinner, Duncan takes her into his Tucker shrine — a room plastered with articles about and photos of the artist — to expose her to the genius of “Juliet.”
“Wow, he’s so gorgeous,” the woman says, looking at Tucker.
“Thank you,” Duncan responds sincerely.
Meanwhile, Annie tells us through a bit of narration, that while she seems like a perfectly sensible English lady, that is “a thin veneer, and it’s starting to crack.”
It’s obvious early on in “Juliet, Naked” that Annie finally has figured out she really wants children, despite she and Duncan agreeing earlier in their relationship that neither did.
One day when Annie is alone in the house, a package arrives for Duncan, and she opens it — he has a habit of letting mail pile up if she doesn’t intervene, we learn. It’s a soon-to-be-released demo of “Juliet,” the titular “Juliet, Naked,” and an executive at the record company figured Duncan would enjoy giving it an early spin. Instead, she puts it into her laptop and listens to it in bed.
Duncan arrives home to find a smoky kitchen — Annie had forgotten she’d started cooking something before seemingly losing herself in “Juliet, Naked” — and soon discovers what was going on in the bedroom. That she would listen to this album before him — and without even telling him about it — devastates him.
“It stinks of betrayal!” he says of the bedroom, leaving it with the disc.
Although Annie feels badly about what she has done, she nonetheless writes a review of the demo on Duncan’s forum, a take that is in stark contrast to his glowing review. When Annie tells Duncan she is the author of the post, he looks appalled, and she asks him if he’ll ban her from the site.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” he says, “however unnuanced.”
However, her review is seen by — and strikes a chord with — the almost mythical Tucker, who, in truth, spends his days living rentfree in the garage of one of his former girlfriends, one of several women with whom he has had a child. While he wasn’t involved in the lives of his other kids, Tucker is determined to do better with 6-year-old son Jackson. But when the two aren’t hanging out in Tucker’s man cave, he has time to search the web and stumble upon things such as Annie’s review.
After reaching out via email to tell her he thinks her opinion of the demo is dead-on — she doesn’t see how this early, basic version of the work can be seen as better than the slaved-over final product — the two strike up an online relationship of sorts, unbeknown to Duncan.
From there, “Juliet, Naked” goes in largely enjoyable but also rather predictable directions.
Annie and Tucker meet, and, eventually, a dinner is shared among them, Jackson and Duncan. If you’re an intense music fan, you can imagine how it would feel to be Duncan; not only is your idol moving on a woman with whom you’ve spent years — not that Duncan hasn’t done things to endanger what he’s had with Annie — but you also find that he may not exactly share your opinions of him and his work.
As with 2000s “High Fidelity,” another adaptation of a Hornby novel — Hornby also once was a music critic for The New Yorker — music is an important background element of the story but it isn’t THE story.
That’s where Hawke (“Boyhood,” “Training Day”) and Byrne (“Bridesmaids,” “Spy”) earn their keep, making the time shared with between Tucker and Annie something a bit more than it might have been in the script from Evgenia Peretz and Jim Taylor & Tamara Jenkins. (The film is ably directed by Jesse Peretz,
brother of Evgenia. The pair previously collaborated on 2011’s “Our Idiot Brother.”)
Hawke is very good in “Juliet, Naked.” The scruffy and vaguely schlubby Tucker feels like a onetime rock star, even if Hawke’s vocals — he performs in the film and on a number of songs on the movie’s soundtrack — are only so convincing.
Meanwhile, O’Dowd (“The Incredible Jessica James,” “Molly’s Game”) is delightful, as usual, earning laugh after laugh. The Irish actor is a big reason why the first third of “Juliet, Naked” is its best stretch.
As the story gets more real, unfortunately, the movie gets less clever. Still, there’s plenty to like about “Juliet, Naked,” especially if you’ve ever worshipped a rock act or an album.