Review: Flora And Son

Image courtesy of Apple TV.

John Carney's films tend to focus on the creative process - namely, that of creating music with others - and on characters who must break out of their comfort zones to be able to reach creative zeniths and find love. His latest, "Flora and Son," is another charmer - albeit one with more of a potty mouth - that follows this trajectory.

As the film opens, Flora (Eve Hewson) is a single mother in Ireland who enjoys partying at clubs with friends and occasionally bringing home some of the men she meets there. Her son, Max (Oren Kinlan), is a borderline juvenile delinquent case who keeps getting into trouble for fighting or stealing things. Flora's estranged husband, Ian (Jack Reynor), is a frustrated musician who once had a shot at musical success, and blames Flora and Max for his failures.

After Max's latest run-in with the law, Flora attempts to find ways to keep him busy and out of trouble. She stumbles across a guitar in a dumpster and brings it home as a gift, which only leads to a row that involves a lot of things being hurled at Flora that most people wouldn't imaging saying to their parents. We later find out that Max has his own musical passions - namely, using technology to create electronic music; he calls it "ambient" - to try to impress a girl on his block who is typically seen modeling for the music videos of some Irish rapper.

But while Max isn't interested in the banged-up rescue guitar, Flora decides to learn to play and enlists a guitar teacher based in Los Angeles named Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to teach her chords. At first, Flora tells her teacher, a failed musician, that her reasons for learning to play including impressing people and picking up men - she even hits on him, cutting short their first lesson - but she ultimately begins to realize the power that music holds, especially after watching a link Jeff sends her of Joni Mitchell playing one of her most iconic songs.

A friendship blossoms between Flora and her music teacher, and she seemingly has her eyes on a local contest at a pub for local musicians. While the film's one flaw is its portrayal of Flora going from complete novice to songwriter in a seemingly short span of time, there's a lot of fun to be had watching the various characters in the film come together to create music with each other.

First, there's Flora giving advice to Jeff on how to improve the lyrics of a song that he wrote, but could never quite nail; then, there's Flora noticing her son's ambition to write a song to woo the girl on the block, and her proposing to help him shoot a music video. A final sequence in which all three of these characters - plus a few more - get together for a performance at the film's end makes for an emotionally resonant finale.

As a director, Carney's films have all focused on the creation of music and while it might seem that the well would run dry eventually on such a narrow topic, this has yet to happen. "Once" was a lovely, low budget romance that went on to become a Broadway musical and "Begin Again" was a charming, bigger budget film with a similar setup, while "Sing Street" (my favorite Carney film) was a lovely coming-of-age musical drama set in Ireland in the 1980s. "Flora and Son" is another sweet variation on this storyline, but it's also a little cheekier. 

As Gordon-Levitt's character points out, the key to creating great music isn't about necessarily reinventing the wheel, but about using the tools available - the chords - and injecting a part of yourself into it to create something magical. In other words, it's about finding the right notes. "Flora and Son" finds them.