This movie is a shameless vehicle for Glen Hanslard’s caterwauling music, nothing more and certainly nothing less. The opening scene, where he is standing out on a street corner wailing his highly repetitive music with great gusto, is okay. “The guy’s a passionate musician,” you think to yourself, “this could be an interesting story!” Then some guy steals his guitar case and he runs him down and recovers it.

If only the guy had swiped his guitar … and gotten away!

But he didn’t. So the film continues on and slowly certain painful things begin to dawn on you. First you realize that … there is no story! The characters just walk around performing this droning, depressing music. (Did I mention how REPETITIVE the music is?!) This film is a love story, they say? How do you figure? These people barely interact! Then he buys her a (really ugly) piano and splits with their demo tape to go make his fortune, leaving her in that crap apartment surrounded by all those losers. A love story would be: they fall in love, move some place really cool, start a band and become successful artists.  Okay, maybe I am overly sentimental.

Second, let’s talk about the music for a sec, shall we? It’s like listening to the drone note of a bag pipe, all by itself, for long stretches of time, overlaid with the harrowing sounds of someone doing really bad things to some poor animal. These songs go on and on and on, and they are so boring and so depressing! He’s just up there HOWLING about his sorry-ass life and some girl who dumped him (can you blame her?). He needs to take happy pills and write something else, something that does not inspire suicide.

Third, the only thing in the movie that had any hope of being the slightest bit interesting is the scene in the studio. But they miss every chance to capitalize on this (they would actually have to write some dialog for that) and instead just seize the opportunity to have this dude rasping out his ultimate creation: a painfully monotonous, bad U2-ripoff in 5/4 time, with Hanslard screeching his agony all over everything. The actor playing the engineer has to pretend to be won over by the group and the song, an acting assignment that is undoubtedly beyond the powers of our greatest thespians, certainly beyond his powers. After something like 10 minutes of this (or it sure seemed that long) the song finally raps up, and someone says “now let’s listen to it on crap speakers, to see if the mix translates.” So they all go for a drive, pop in the tape, and yup, the very same endless, wretched song plays all over again, in its entirety. It’s just unspeakably cruel.

When you walk out of the theater, all you will take with you are the mournful, numbing strains of his life-denying music, playing in your head like an evil carousel from Hell that you are strapped to for all eternity.