Begin Again is a movie about the joy of making music and living a life enriched by music. It’s a movie that captures the roll pop music used to play as a bonding agent between humans, especially romantically, and offers up the happy and encouraging idea that music could still play that role in people’s lives. And it’s a movie that has the balls to make a declaration about where pop music has “gone wrong”, who is to blame, and what is to be done about it. It has its flaws to be sure, and I’m not at all certain its theories are correct, but it was a pleasure to watch a film that actually caused real, honest-to-goodness thoughts in my brain afterward – after what has been the most uninspiring and dispiriting six months of movies that I can remember, this film lifted my spirits quite a bit, and I actually felt some excitement about the prospect of reviewing it.

Some may dismiss this film as strictly a “feel good” enterprise, but it makes you want to start a rock band and record music, so it must have done something right. The various scenes of recording music have a great deal of charm and energy, and are fun to watch. The architecture of the story is quite good, with interesting characters and lots of opportunity for substantive interaction between them. And the film’s theme – the power of music, and more generally of artistic expression, in people’s lives – is not only very compelling, but also rarely explored in films. Where Begin Again is less successful is in the writing particulars. Dialog and scene structure frequently come across as clunky and amateurish, and although it manages to create a lot of would-be powerful emotional moments between characters and for characters, it doesn’t earn those moments, and thus they fall flat and disappoint. It also rides its music a bit too much, both the original score and the soundtrack.

This film benefits tremendously from the electrifying presence of Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley. People are finally becoming aware now of how great Ruffalo is, not just his acting talent, but his whole fabulous persona of the sexy-seedy, middle-aged stud with awesome hair. But Keira Knightley has long been an unsung favorite of mine who I felt had never gotten a true chance to shine. This film might be as close as she’ll ever get, and that incredibly natural, inviting energy that she emits on-screen is both fully evident and well-exploited. Supporting performances are on the whole quite solid. So this film is something of a mixed bag – fantastic stars, fun music and great themes, but sub-par writing and execution. As my wife summarized it: “It’s hard to see a film with this much going for it fail to rise up and be truly great”. I completely agree.

What gives Begin Again a bit of additional weight as a movie is that it also has the guts to make an unambiguous statement about the record industry and the future of pop music. Its statement is that record companies are nothing but parasites on artists, and it proposes a guerrilla approach to music making, exploiting powerful music software on laptops, and centered ultimately on selling music direct to the consumer. I’m certainly sympathetic to this basic idea, especially as a guerrilla composer of pop music myself. But where this film gets a little confused is in what it thinks record companies are not doing. In the beginning of the film, there is some lip service paid to the idea that record companies no longer develop and nurture musical talent, instead focusing on identifying pieces of visual human product to market to tweens. This idea is quickly dropped, however, in favor of a “fuck-em, do it yourself” attitude that posits that the music industry is not merely broken or corrupt, but actually an outmoded and moribund concept, rendered archaic and pointless by consumer music technology. This makes no sense in the context of the story, of course, because Ruffalo himself is a highly skilled part of the record industry, working pro bono, as it were, and the band’s fabulous bass player and drummer were only involved via his considerable connections within in the music industry. Sure, Keira Knightley can say “fuck the music industry”, because she’s getting its considerable fruits totally for free!

It’s easy to see where this “fuck-em” attitude comes from, when you ponder the astronomically expensive studio time and production talent that is showered on the revolting, auto-tuned rubbish of the last 15 years. But this war between soulless record companies and rebellious artists is actually a trilateral war, featuring a third camp whose views are left out of this film’s theories: this third camp feels that record companies are broken and corrupt, perhaps irredeemably so, but feels that guerrilla music making on no budget does not really solve the problem, because although it’s clearly possible now to make music that way, you’re never going to make Rumors that way; you’re never going to make Songs in the Key of Life that way, or Thriller, or Aja, or Sergeant Pepper, or Born to Run, or Hotel California, or Dark Side of the Moon, or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. You might make Nebraska that way, but you’ll never make Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I actually reside in this third camp, and feel that Begin Again itself contributes toward proving my point: that the problem with pop music is both deeper and of a different sort than the view put forth in this film. Consider: the music in this movie might be better than auto-tuned dog-shit like Katy Perry, Beyonce, Demi Lovato, Lady Gaga, or whoever. But it still shares the exact same advanced state of decay that all modern pop music has for the last 15 years: lazy repetitiveness; lack of lyrical structure and cohesive integration with the music; reliance on a tiny and ever-shrinking set of harmonic and melodic motifs, hooks and tricks; extreme rhythmic banality; uninteresting and unoriginal vocal technique; and so on and so forth. The film’s songs are okay, I guess, but they all sound basically the same, they use the same tiny handful of musical ideas, and they are, in the end, kind of boring, in pretty much the same way a Katy Perry song seems catchy at first and then quickly winds up being boring.

Try an experiment. Watch Begin Again in a movie theater so you can really hear its music, and then go home and listen once through to Traci Chapman’s Revolution or Baby Can I Hold You through really good headphones, and then see if you can still sing one fucking song from this movie! Try it with The Pretenders’ Human or Back on the Chain Gang. Try it with 10,000 Maniac’s Hey Jack Kerouac. Try it with Kirsty MacColl’s Halloween. Try it with Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rhythm of the Blues. Try it with Blondie’s Dreaming or Union City Blue. And I’m limiting my list to golden-age female pop acts that are roughly comparable to Keira Knightley and her band. Trust me, if you try my experiment you will be absolutely shocked. I sat there alternately laughing and crying as I listened, sadly, to how great pop music used to be – lyrically, melodically, thematically, sonically – and thought about just how much has been lost. Getting it back is way harder than John Carney realizes, and is not simply a matter of everyone recording their shit on laptops and giving it away on the net.

Begin Again: It’s entertaining and thought provoking. I recommend it!