‘Song to Song’: Beautiful searchers seek meaning in Austin’s music scene

Anyone who’s familiar with Terrence Malick’s post-”Tree of Life” period, which has included the wispy, maddeningly discursive “To the Wonder” and “Knight of Cups,” will at least be prepared for “Song to Song,” a movie that plays like the last installment of a trilogy running on fumes.

Or maybe not fumes — more like enigmatic, ephemeral zephyrs. Or gentle puffs of existential longing. In “Song to Song,” Malick continues his search for meaning by way of a fragmentary narrative about artists adrift in modern life — in this case, in the filmmaker’s home town of Austin, Texas.

Taking his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki along to the town’s most famous music festivals — South by Southwest, Austin City Limits and the Fun Fun Fun Fest — arranging his attractive actors against equally arresting natural and built environments, Malick interrogates notions of ambition, creative freedom, love and sex in improvised vignettes that ping and pop with increasingly confounding randomness. Individual mileage will vary as to whether viewers find their accrued effect to be enlightening, enervating or simply infuriating.

Rooney Mara plays Faye, an aspiring singer-songwriter who comes under the tutelage of Cook (Michael Fassbender), a charismatic music producer. At one of Cook’s parties — held at his gorgeous modernist home overlooking the Colorado River — Faye meets BV, a young musician played by Ryan Gosling with uncanny echoes of his character in “La La Land.”

A romantic triangle ensues, as Cook pressures BV to sign with him and Faye agonizes over which man to stick with. The geometry is complicated when Cook meets an impoverished teacher moonlighting as a waitress (played by a peroxided Natalie Portman) and BV strikes up a relationship with a prodigal local played by Cate Blanchett.

Filmed on location throughout Austin — from its cozy arts-and-crafts cottages to its sleekest penthouses, with scruffy mosh pits and a side trip to Mexico thrown in for exotic flavor — “Song to Song” ambles and doglegs and circles back to recurring questions, often intoned by the characters themselves in whispered voice-overs. People ask each other whether they’re scared, they ask themselves if they’re “a good person,” they sway and exchange meaningful glances, they put their hands on each other’s faces. Malick and his editing team get in and out of scenes quickly, often joining an argument midway through, leaving the audience to piece together what’s being said and, more deeply, what it all means.

On paper, Malick’s deconstructed approach to cinema sounds intriguing, if not refreshingly radical. After making an astonishing debut in 1973 with “Badlands,” followed up by the equally breathtaking “Days of Heaven,” the filmmaker has become increasingly intuitive, even meditative, in his approach, and why not? After years being ruled by linear three-act structure, it’s past time for film to be liberated from the shackles of tyrannical narrative. What better way for a writer-director to explore the numinous — those transcendent moments of spiritual connection that so often transpire in life’s thin places in nature and between people?

The problem is that what certainly began as a philosophical and aesthetic inquiry has wound up looking indulgent and shallow, like little more than people posing, grasping at anything to make themselves interesting in front of Lubezki’s constantly moving camera. Fassbender literally does back flips to give his Mephistophelean control freak something to do. At one point, someone puts little toy animals on his girlfriend’s face in a lame attempt to be playful.

Gosling noodles around a little bit on keyboards and guitar, but Mara is painfully at sea, stranded with a guitar with literally nothing to do but look pretty and conflicted. Cameos from the likes of Patti Smith, Iggy Pop and John Lydon, among other famous musicians, only underline the sense that the actors and filmmakers are interlopers operating under received and hopelessly dated ideas about how the music world works and what it feels like.

There’s a moment in “Song to Song” when the film seems to snap to: Linda Emond, who plays BV’s mother, has a scene in a restaurant that suddenly seems sharp and focused and on point. It raises the question as to Malick’s motives when he casts his films. Is he looking for pretty faces to twirl and moon about, or is he looking for actors who can make the most of his purposefully sketchy script notes, creating fully realized scenes and characters from scratch?

“Song to Song” is a painful movie to watch, not only because it’s so dithery and overlong, but because it reveals Malick to be a filmmaker far more interested in surfaces than his vaunted intellectual depth would suggest. The disappointment extends to his sex scenes, which have a leering, sophomoric quality utterly out of keeping with his storied reserve.

Put another way: Malick’s interest in creative freedom completely ignores the equally vital role of structure, rigor and discipline, whether in the art of songwriting or filmmaking itself. If “Song to Song” is a punctuation point in Malick’s search for a new visual language, let it be an instructive one.

Maybe it’s time for him to give the old-fashioned fundamentals of story and fully realized characters another chance. They served him well, once. For now, as Faye says at the beginning of the film, he seems to be reaching for air.

VAN REDIN — BROAD GREEN PICTURES From left, Rooney Mara as Faye, Michael Fassbender as Cook and Ryan Gosling as BV in “Song to Song.”