A Star Is Not Born

Flora and Son a film by John Carney.  With Eve Hewson, Oren Kinlan, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paul Reid.  Streaming on Apple TV.  *****

Flora and Son is a delightful movie about a woman who, for no good reason, wants to take up music, and a failed, somewhat broken ex-performer who takes the time to teach her.  It is also about a single mother raising a son under difficult circumstances in Dublin.  I haven’t checked in with Dublin since I read James Joyce, and was surprised at what a modern city it was, complete with new apartment houses (tiny apartments) and shopping malls.  The other thing I wasn’t prepared for was the incredibly crude language that is daily speech for the characters (Joyce didn’t mention that).  I like colorful language and have a crude side myself.  I’m just not used to a thirteen-year-old boy calling his mother a cunt and she countering by calling him a little prick.  Nice.

Flora (Eve Hewson) is a woman who, by her own admission, has always wanted to move on to the next thing.  When she got pregnant at the age of 17, she went ahead and had the baby instead of traveling somewhere for an abortion, and eventually settled down with the father of this child, a man named Kev (Paul Reid).  Kev himself is a performing bass player, though he hasn’t made much of a go of it.  Their child Max (Oran Kinlan) lives mostly with his mother but sometimes with his father, feels unwanted (with good reason), and has gotten into trouble with the law on various occasions.  He admires the gangsta rap that people are producing in Dublin, and has his eye on a girl who is enamored of it.

After she has missed Max’s birthday, Flora finds an acoustic guitar in a dumpster and offers it as a belated present.  He’s way past wanting to play acoustic, and really Flora is projecting; she’s the one who wants to play.  She goes online to find a teacher, finally settles on one in, of all places, L.A.  He’s a good-looking modest guy named Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who seems to have a certain hurt and vulnerability in his eyes.  But he genuinely loves music and knows its value.

Flora is a mess.  She probably just using music to get guys (she spends most of the first lesson flirting with Jeff), smokes and drinks during their lessons (and much of the rest of the time), brings up all kinds of irrelevant crap.  She wants to be an accomplished guitarist and songwriter before she’s learned anything at all.  Jeff, on the other hand, loves music to the point of worship; when he finally manages to teach her a C-chord, in the second lesson, he gives a long speech about how precious that is now that she has it.  He’s accomplished as a guitarist and has a beautiful singing voice; first he passes off a Hoagy Carmichael song as his own, then, eventually, plays a song for Flora that he actually wrote.  The song is okay, but slightly dumb.  Hoagy Carmichael he’s not.

For all her flaws, Flora knows good music.  She has the guts to tell Jeff his song isn’t good but believes she can see a way to improve it.  She seems to have a lot of music in her head; she just hasn’t done the work to develop her talent.

In the meantime, right under her nose, Max is devoting himself to his kind of music, which involves a lot of equipment he doesn’t own.  He makes use of what he has and can borrow.  He’s inventive as a rapper and gets together with his mother to produce the kind of video he wants to do.  She finally sees that she needs to let him be who he is, warts and all (Max is a frumpy adolescent at the beginning of things, but as he gets confidence he becomes good looking and charming); each has something to offer the other.  It isn’t until Max tries to steal the equipment he needs and has to do time in a juvenile correction facility, that Flora realizes how much she loves him.  Finally she shows it, and he appreciates it.

Flora makes reference to the movie “A Star Is Born” in a conversation with Jeff (she likes it; he doesn’t).  If this were a blockbuster Hollywood movie like that, she and Max and Jeff would form some collaboration in L.A. that would make them stars forever (then descend into drug use and degradation).  The movie that they’re actually in does end in a weird collaboration among not just the three of them but also Flora’s ex; it involves weird staging where Jess is on a computer in L.A., Kev is on his electric bass (Flora quashes him when he tries to play a solo), Flora on acoustic and Max handling electronic equipment, wearing a huge parka and a baseball cap; she sings, he raps, Jeff plays backup, and it isn’t in front of the huge roaring crowd at a coliseum but a bar in Dublin on amateur night (the act before them was dreadful).  We never actually hear whether they won or not (though one patron insists their act was all shite, the preferred pronunciation in Dublin).  We finally realize that this movie is about people coming together with their peculiar gifts and flaws (Flora still drinks too much; Max doesn’t get the girl) and making music.  I thought that song was great, not shite at all, and that this movie, in contrast to many others, understands what music is all about.

I’ll take it over “A Star is Born.”  Not even close.