Song One (2014)

Image courtesy of commonsensemedia.org

I was in a coma for a couple weeks when I was twenty, after a car accident. My favorite musician did not visit me. But as far as I know, every friend who did visit fell in love during their hospital visits. All of them. Without fail. Because they bonded over shared pain and a mutual love of music. Not sure many PhDs came by, though. At least two that I know of - not in anthropology.

Franny (Anne Hathaway) is doing fieldwork in Morocco when she gets the call that her brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield) is in a coma after getting hit by a car, so she flies home to New York and moves back in with her mom Karen (Mary Steenburgen) after years of distance. While keeping vigil at the hospital, she dives into Henry’s world - his music, his journal, his old thoughts - and discovers his favorite artist is British singer-songwriter James Forester (Johnny Flynn), who’s touring nearby. She catches his show, meets him after, tells him about Henry, and the two end up growing close - he’s been creatively stuck since his one big album, she’s carrying guilt over a fight with Henry about his music career. Between hospital visits, a tense half-birthday party with her mom, a night that turns romantic, and a song they record together called “Afraid of Heights,” things build until James plays for Henry and he starts to stir - then wakes up fully the next day (BECAUSE MUSIC AND LOVE). On James’ last night in the US, Franny can’t get into his sold-out show, watches him on a screen instead, but leaves him a CD of their song in his car, so they each end up listening to it alone as he drives off and she heads home.

Ah, the musical that isn’t a musical. Think John Carney - Once, Begin Again, Sing Street (haven’t gotten to Power Ballad yet). This has the shape of a Carney film, just less polished, a bit sadder, and with fewer songs. These are the kind of films that, if they’re good enough, get campaigned in the drama category at the Golden Globes instead of taking the easier win in comedy/musical. Song One wouldn’t have won either category, honestly - partly because A) it’s boring and dull, and partly because B) nothing here was competing with Best Comedy, with gutbusting pure comedy The Martian in the category. But the dullness is really the bigger problem. It’s a wet paper bag soaked in melodrama that can’t fight its way out.

Johnny Flynn mumbles his way through the entire film, except when he’s singing - which, to be fair, he does well. Otherwise he’s barely a character, more like a less fun, less interesting version of the manic pixie dream girl: mysterious and moody because the script needs him to be, not because there’s a person underneath it. Hathaway does what she can with a role that mostly requires her to look grief-stricken in dim hospital lighting, and Steenburgen is wasted in a mother role that gestures at old resentments without ever digging into them. The romance between Franny and James is supposed to feel earned through music and shared sorrow, but it never slows down enough to earn anything - it just states its own significance and moves on.

The songs are genuinely the best part, which is both the film’s saving grace and its biggest tell. It leans so hard on the soundtrack to do the emotional work that the story around it feels like an afterthought. We don’t learn enough about any of these characters to actually invest in them, so the big swings - the coma-defying awakening, the tearful CD-in-the-car finale - land soft instead of hard. It’s half-baked and undercooked, and it seems to assume that as long as there’s singing and songwriting at the center, we’ll feel something anyway. Sometimes we do. Mostly we don’t.

2.5 out of 5 Stars