A star really is born...
She lost out in a TV talent show, but Jessie Buckley is having the last laugh with a barnstorming turn as a Glaswegian country singer who dreams of Nashville fame
Wild Rose (15) Verdict: Hits all the right notes ★★★★✩ mid90s (15) Verdict: Powerful nostalgia trip ★★★★✩
Eleven years ago, Irish teenager Jessie Buckley was making a splash on I’d Do Anything, the BBC1 talent contest which set out to find an unknown to play nancy, the tart with a heart, in a West end revival of Oliver!
She finished runner-up, but Andrew lloyd Webber, the presiding judge, pronounced solemnly that she had oodles of that elusive attribute, ‘star quality’.
His lordship was right, and Buckley has had a good dollop of success in the years since. She was especially wonderful as plain, oppressed Princess Marya Bolkonskaya in the 2016 BBC adaptation of War & Peace.
But that role didn’t exactly showcase her charisma, nor a set of pipes to rival Tammy Wynette’s or Dolly Parton’s. Wild Rose does. now a seasoned, seen-it-all veteran of 29, Buckley still hasn’t quite converted her abundant star quality into major stardom. This film could well be the springboard.
She plays Rose-lynn, a feckless (but not charmless) Glaswegian mother-oftwo, who, as the movie starts, is coming to the end of a jail sentence for smuggling heroin into another prison.
Before she was sent down, Rose-lynn worked as a country singer in Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry, named after the famous venue in nashville, Tennessee.
now that she’s had a period of reflection, and time to consider her priorities in life, she yearns more than ever to hit the big time in nashville itself. She craves this much more than she desires a reunion with her kids.
After all, it’s not their names tattooed on her arm, but ‘Three chords and the truth’, the line supposedly coined by U.S. songwriter Harlan Howard to describe country music. Indeed, her full stage name is Rose-lynn Harlan.
Yet the realities of an ex-convict’s life do not hold much room for fantasies. Rose-lynn has had a 7pm-7am curfew slapped on her, which prevents her from resuming her old job. She also has to wear an electronic ankle tag.
And if these weren’t enough to drag her down to earth, she has her disapproving mum Marion (Julie Walters) to remind her that fame in nashville is not compatible with motherhood in Glasgow.
‘Mind yer tag disnae go off when you’re going through security,’ sniffs Marion, who has herself never been further west than Dunoon. ‘There’s no shortage of folk who can sing,’ she tells her daughter.
The presence of Walters, brilliant as ever and (to my english ears) spot-on with those Clydeside vowels, at first bolsters the sense that what we are seeing here is a kind of country-music version of Billy elliot. Surely, Rose-lynn, both metaphorically and actually, will cast off the shackles of her background and soar.
BUT Wild Rose is a smarter film than that. Unlike all those country songs about divorce and dead dogs, whenever we think we know just where it’s heading, it takes us somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Rose-lynn needs a job, and her aunt fixes her up with a cleaning gig in a handsome middleclass home.
It isn’t the kind of gig she has in mind, but her kindly english employer, Susannah (a well-cast Sophie Okonedo), finds her working-class Glaswegian earthiness endearing. When she then hears
her feisty young cleaner sing, transforming herself into a veritable Tammy or Dolly, sparkling like rhinestones, Susannah decides to use her own 50th birthday party as a crowd-funding exercise to send Rose-lynn to nashville.
But Susannah doesn’t know about the prison sentence. Or the children.
now is the time for Rose-lynn to
pursue her ambitions, she tells her unlikely protegee, before the encumbrance of a family. ‘Do you want kids?’ she adds. ‘Oh, yeah,’ replies Rose-Lynn. ‘Just not yet.’ Rose-Lynn’s inner conflict about her children is one of the most affecting elements of this enormously engaging film. But then, all her torments, including her suppressed ambitions, find an outlet in country music. ‘It gets whatever’s in there, oot,’ she tells Susannah.
I loved last year’s A Star Is Born, which Wild Rose superficially resembles, but there’s much more going on here likely to appeal to a British audience, not least nuances of class and race.
To detail further specifics of the plot would steer us dangerously towards spoiler territory, but let’s just say that the main characters evolve satisfyingly, and that the venerable radio presenter ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris plays himself with a very beguiling clunkiness.
The director is Tom Harper, not to be confused with Tom (The King’s Speech) Hooper. Harper’s credits are mainly in TV (he directed Buckley in War & Peace), and there’s a tellystyle pacing about Wild Rose that serves it well.
Well done, too, to screenwriter Nicole Taylor. She’s done a lovely job.
But this film belongs to Buckley. She acts beautifully, sings gloriously, looks great and nails the accent. The girl who would once do anything, can now do everything.
IN mid90s, it’s skateboarding rather than singing that represents hope; a way to forge a new life.
Our hero is a 13-year-old child, Stevie (superbly played by Sunny Suljic). At home in suburban, Nineties Los Angeles, he’s never too sure who’s currently sleeping with his mom (Katherine Waterston).
She does her best and loves her sons, but finds single motherhood a constant trial. Stevie’s only certainty is that his troubled older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges), will bully him relentlessly.
So he badly needs friends, people he can look up to, and finds them in a bunch of grungy skateboarders several years older than himself.
The way his face lights up when they ask him to do the most mundane tasks, validating his existence, will break every parent’s heart.
Whether their influence on Stevie is positive or malign is a question this coming-of-age story spends most of its compelling, poignant, funny, 85 minutes exploring.
The debutant writer-director is Jonah Hill, best known as a comic actor in the likes of Superbad and the 21 Jump Street series, but here showing real prowess as a sensitive, observant filmmaker.