A real crowd-pleaser that strikes all the right chords
Wild Rose 15 cert, 100 min ★★★★★ Dir Tom Harper
Starring Jessie Buckley, Julie Walters, Sophie Okonedo, Jamie Sives, James Harkness, Ashley Shelton
Stars aren’t born like Jessie Buckley every day. If the foot-stomping country music drama Wild Rose were a talent show, she’d blaze over every hurdle to win it. In fact, since she was pipped in the final of the BBC’S I’d Do Anything in 2008, this has to count as coming back with a vengeance. She has grit, enormous charm, a kind of chin-up defiance, and the combination of acting and singing expertise in which neither side of the equation lags behind.
Excellent in 2017’s Beast as a troubled bystander in a murder mystery, Buckley latches onto this new role with throaty gusto. As Rose-lynn Harlan, a recent parolee itching to follow her dreams all the way to Nashville, she has a heap of baggage tied to her like an anchor: principally two children, a school-age daughter and son, whom she clearly wishes she hadn’t had so young. As the film begins, she comes back
ebulliently into their lives, following a year served inside for drunkenly throwing some heroin over a prison fence.
Their grandmother Marion (Julie Walters), who works in a Glasgow bakery, has taken on the hard graft of bringing up these two with a simmering sense of grievance, and continues to do so as Rose-lynn plots her escape, pursuing every avenue she can to get back on stage singing. Not many options abound – she’s persona non grata in Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry, and has an electronic ankle monitor that keeps her under evening curfew, making gigs impossible. For money, she gets a cleaning job, and her employer turns out to be something of a guardian angel: this is Susannah, a moneyed mother-of-two played by Sophie Okonedo, who has just the wherewithal (and BBC contacts) Rose-lynn might need to get noticed.
Okonedo is lovely, rendering Susannah well-meaning to a fault without stinting on her natural warmth. And Walters, lately on something of a roll, lends more than just reliable substance to her part. Dreaming of Nashville: Jessie Buckley as country singer Rose-lynn Harlan Marion is stony, stressed, hard to please, which we get even from the rigid way she brings food to the table. But she’s waiting to be not disappointed by her daughter, and for her own maternal instincts to show some sign of being transmitted. Doing all the film’s hard labour, she creates a credible workhorse of a character with a fairly peerless lack of ostentation.
Directed with vim by Tom Harper, Wild Rose is a serious crowd-pleaser, all right, but what’s so refreshing about it is the way it refuses emotional shortcuts – it doesn’t cheat, rarely sentimentalises. Nicole Taylor’s debut film script is a clever feat of construction, coaxing us elegantly, near-invisibly, around all this story’s necessary bends and handbrake turns.
There’s a very funny scene trying to appeal Rose-lynn’s parole terms – “Your lordship, a more contrite young lady it would hard be find...” declaims her solicitor, a Pinocchio nose almost visibly growing out of his face. And then Rose-lynn – in one of Taylor’s best little touches – drags the same man into the Ole Opry for celebrations, clambering up for an impromptu rendition of Chris Stapleton’s Outlaw State of Mind.
Finally, it’s the marrying of Roselynn’s country ethos with her own struggle that makes everything click into place. The film maintains a careful tension about what following your dreams might entail: some dreams, like Dorothy’s journey to Oz, only wind up confirming what matters most at home.
The film really comes up trumps at the very end, saving its two best songs for last, and the two which specifically relate to Rose-lynn the best. The huge contrast in how Buckley sings them – and who’s listening – sums up the film’s themes irresistibly, with a Yellow Brick Road reference even smartly embedded in the lyrics. Landing the perfect ending is a challenge for any such story – A Star is Born, for all its guts and pathos, peaked early. Wild Rose holds its horses, and lets Roselynn soar only once she’s worked out who she is.