Dir.: Brett Haley; Cast: Nick Offermann, Kiersey Clemons, Toni Colette, Ted Danson, Sasha Lane, Blythe Danner; USA 2018, 97 min.
Best known for his comedy drama The Hero (2017, Brett Haley’s latest HEARTS BEAT LOUD adds music to the formula, but a minimalist storyline and cardboard characters make it hard going at over 90 minutes.
Frank Fisher (Offermann) is one of those life-long middle-aged loafers unable to let go of his dream of a music career. Meanwhile his relationship with his daughter Sam (Sasha Lane) is fraught by efforts to talk the budding medical student into postponing her studies to join him in his musical endeavours. But Sam is a smart cookie and the death of her mother in a cycling accident, leaving Frank in charge of her education, has taught the teenager a lesson – to ignore her father.
Since the death of his wife, Frank has had a series of unsatisfactory relationships probably due to his role model in mother Marianne (Danner), who has recently been arrested for shoplifting. Things with his landlady cum girlfriend Leslie (Colette) are even more strained, and his record shop has gone bankrupt. Only his old friend Dave (Danson), who has run a bar for over thirty years, seems to understand Frank, since he too lives in the (Woodstock) past. Somehow Haley must have felt that his old-fashioned musical numbers needed some contemporary characters to re-invent them but the ones he has created don’t really move the narrative forward, since they’re all entrenched in their cliché-ridden existence. DoP Erin Lin tries for a sort of melancholic nostalgia with brown and light blue dominating the picture, but this can’t save an undercooked script which might have worked better as a thirty-minute vignette AS
NATIONWIDE FROM 3 AUGUST 2018