Hearts Beat Loud

This Sundance Film Festival favorite will melt the hearts of all but the most jaded of viewers. It’s a profoundly touching crowd-pleaser if ever there was one that wears its heart on its sleeve using a combination of original songs and lyrics performed by a father and daughter musician duo jamming together to creatively express their inner torment.

A hipster widower Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman) who runs a vinyl record store in the Brooklyn NY neighborhood of Red Hook, and his singer songwriter daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) who wants to go to medical school, are struggling with the loss of his wife and mother to Sam.

It’s the end of an era for single father Frank as he deals with issues of his aging mother, the regrets of his youth, losing his record store, and now his daughter who is about to go off to UCLA to attend medical school to become a doctor.

When Frank submits one of their jam session songs onto the free online music streaming service Spotify, the song becomes a hit on a popular indie mix, and Frank suddenly gets visions of touring with his daughter across the country and becoming famous as a live band act. But his dream of rekindling his former life as a successful pop rock musician is fading fast as he tries to convince his talented daughter to put aside her “childish dream” of becoming a doctor for a life as a musician.

Hearts Beat Loud starts out as a low key comedy focusing on the daily drama of its charming characters and gradually, like the music in the film, crescendos into a devastatingly heartfelt emotional explosion on multiple levels.

The film is a sad commentary on coming to terms with today’s new social and economic realities, the disparity between art and commerce, and nostalgia and regrets of past glories. But the film also emphasizes the power of the creative process to renew our hopes for the future.

This musical drama follows in the tradition of such recent let’s-start-a-band indie films as Once (2007), Begin Again (2014), Sing Street (2016) and Band Aid (2017). I also loved how we were exposed to some high-tech gadgets that help musicians create music in this new age of social media and computer-generated synthesizers that have changed the music industry.

Not only do we get the outstanding musical talents of the main characters, Kiersey Clemons is a real-life classical jazz singer, and Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation (2009) is hilarious as a man-child dealing with adult responsibilities with his deadpan humor while trying to elicit reactions from his daughter, we also get an excellent supporting cast of characters; Ted Danson, Sasha Lane from American Honey (2016), Toni Collette, and Blyth Danner.

Director Bret Haley shows a sensitive touch with the realistically awkward and complicated relationship between a vulnerable father and daughter who start a band to deal with their real-life issues.

Hearts Beat Loud is a wonderful if sometimes sappy sentimental feel-good film we could all use in these harsh divisive times of intolerance.

JP