‘WILD ROSE’ BLOOMS WITH BUCKLEY’S PERFORMANCE
JESSIE BUCKLEY BRINGS MORE THAN A SET OF PIPES TO THE ROLE OF ROSE-LYNN IN “WILD ROSE.”
Rose-Lynn Harlan, the fieryhaired heroine of the hugely satisfying kitchen-sink fairy tale “Wild Rose,” isn’t the kind of gal who whistles while she works. She sings while she vacuums, running the cleaner across the carpet and crooning her favorite country tunes, her voice a startling distillation of raw talent and emotion. She closes her eyes and loses herself in the music, and for a brief moment reality fades from view, a foyer becomes a stage, and an act of daily drudgery becomes a glorious, hallucinatory bliss-out.
Rose-Lynn shares her star-isborn aura with Jessie Buckley, the extraordinary Irish actress playing her. But the foyer isn’t hers; it belongs to her wealthy employer, Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), who decides to play the fairy godmother. But Rose-Lynn’s chances of realizing her dreams seem as far away as Nashville, the country-music mecca she’s long pined for from her hometown, Glasgow.
“I should have been born in America,” she frets, bemoaning the fact that the only other person on this side of the Atlantic who gives a damn about country is legendary radio host Bob Harris (who later makes a lovely cameo). She doesn’t yet realize that being a Scotswoman with a passion for American music is what makes her gift so indelible and unique.
She’ll figure it out soon enough. Harlan Howard’s fabled formula for the country genre — “three chords and the truth” — means so much to Rose-Lynn that she’s had it tattooed on her arm. That mantra could also describe “Wild Rose,” which, like most good country tunes, is a simple, skillful arrangement of tried-and-true notes that are no less affecting for being so familiar. The screenwriter, Nicole Taylor, and the director, Tom Harper, compose their story in clean, stirring melodic lines that they return to again and again, treating
Rose-Lynn’s many setbacks — as well as her small, crucial steps toward growth and self-discovery — like subtle variations on a refrain.
That fall-backward-stumbleforward rhythm is a natural one for Rose-Lynn, as it is for many of us, though her most recent tumble has been rougher than most. When we
meet her, she’s striding out of the prison where she spent 12 months for a rash attempt at heroin smuggling, a smile on her face and a curfew-enforcing ankle monitor beneath her cowgirl boots. She’s only 23 and eager to slip back into some of her life’s comforting routines, including hooking up with an on-and-off boyfriend (James Harkness) and singing with her band at Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry.
But not everyone is willing to welcome Rose-Lynn back, at least not on the same terms as before. She has two young kids — their names, in a nice touch, are Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) and Lyle (Adam Mitchell) — who have spent the past year living with their grandmother, Marion (Julie Walters), and they’re not exactly thrilled to be back in their mother’s care.
Taylor’s script is plausibly grounded in the rhythms of day-today family life, in the tough realities of cramped apartments, meager paychecks and broken promises.
Long before her breakthrough work in last year’s thriller “Beast,” Buckley came to fame singing on the BBC talent show “I’d Do Anything.” But she brings more than just a powerful set of pipes to this role; she finds the emotional coherence in an array of seemingly contradictory moods and impulses, showing us how Rose-Lynn’s brash, swaggering confidence goes hand in hand with her crippling insecurities.
The story builds to a wrenching series of shifts and reversals — physical, emotional, tonal, musical. (The country-stuffed soundtrack includes several original songs, including a showstopper written by Mary Steenburgen, Caitlyn Smith and Kate York.) But the crowdpleasing spirit that animates “Wild Rose” is also, happily, a spirit of nuance, and Rose-Lynn’s soul searching leads her to a hardearned understanding of who she is and who she is destined to become.