HEARTS BEAT LOUD (Brett Haley). 97 minutes. Opens Friday (June 22). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Hearts Beat Loud is a charming, low-stakes drama about a middle-aged musician’s attempts to start a band with his daughter. Not much happens, but it’s awfully sweet. And I’ll be honest: after I’ll See You In My Dreams and The Hero, I wasn’t expecting Brett Haley to ever make a movie this good, but I’m very happy he did.
Frank (Nick Offerman) is awfully close to being a Brooklyn cliché. Once upon a time he was a professional guitarist, and now he runs a record store in Red Hook. His daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) is getting ready to head off to UCLA at the end of the summer. She’s deep in her studies, but Frank can still persuade her to jam in their home studio.
One evening, Frank and Sam wind up creating a pretty good song; he puts it on Spotify, it finds its way onto a playlist and all of a sudden a hobby becomes a potential career.
As in his previous features, Haley and his regular collaborator, Marc Basch, set up a bunch of simple, familiar story points and proceed to resolve them with minimal complication and no tension whatsoever – which doesn’t sound all that great, except that Offerman and Clemons are note-perfect in their roles, making their every moment crackle.
Together or separately, they’re utterly watchable; Offerman, who played Sam Elliott’s weed guy in The Hero, finds bottomless complexity in the widowed, sensitive Frank, while Clemons (of Dope and Transparent) breaks out as his gifted, self-aware daughter.
Toni Collette, Ted Danson and American Honey’s Sasha Lane round out the cast, and Keegan DeWitt contributes Frank and Sam’s very catchy original songs.
Hearts Beat Loud bops along on the strength of its performances and its emotions. You’ll never be on the edge of your seat or anything, but that’s not what Haley’s going for. He just wants you to sing along.