Flora and Son movie review: Eve Hewson is fabulous in Apple’s pitch-perfect musical drama

Flora and Son movie review: Eve Hewson, daughter of music icon Bono, commands every frame of director John Crowley’s feel-good drama.

There’s a scene in the new film Flora and Son where Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character takes a rather mean-spirited attitude towards James Blunt and his pop anthem “You’re Beautiful,” without realising that the movie he’s in is the cinematic equivalent of that song — frothy, uplifting, and deeply heartfelt. Directed by John Carney, best known for his music dramas Once and Begin Again, Flora and Son finds the filmmaker returning to familiar themes — the volatile middle-ground between passion and pragmatism, blue collar existence, and male angst.

It’s also two movies stuffed into one. The first is a working class drama about a young single mother named Flora (Eve Hewson, returning for her second Apple project after the brilliant Bad Sisters) and her delinquent teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) butting heads under the same roof in Dublin. The second is a sweeping romance in which Flora decides to take online guitar lessons to impress men in bars. After scanning the internet for a suitable teacher, she picks Jeff (Gordon-Levitt), a slightly older man who lives across the world in sunny southern California.

To make ends meet, Flora works odd jobs here and there. She was only 17 when she gave birth to Max, and in one scene, she lets him know how deeply she resents having him and losing her youth. Max’s father, a local layabout named Ian (Jack Reynor) is a failed musician who’ll tell anybody within earshot that his band was once listed to play the same gig as Snow Patrol. He spends most of his days playing video games now.

Max divides his time between Flora and Ian, but doesn’t really like either of them. He acts out by engaging in petty crime, routinely ending up at the local police station, where the cops welcome him like a hotel concierge would a regular guest. But because his crimes are mostly harmless, he is let off with slaps on the wrist. The threat of being sent away to a juvenile detention centre, however, looms large. To get away from the gloominess of her life — it’s all manufactured chic, by the way; this isn’t a gritty Shane Meadows movie — Flora begins to look forward to her weekly guitar lessons, which essentially function as therapy sessions for both her and Jeff, who has his own past demons to vanquish.

Even though they’re connecting only virtually, there’s an immediate spark. While Jeff tells her to broaden her horizons, she engages him in conversations about his own songs, which he admits with a certain bitterness were never good enough. It’s almost as if he had been waiting all his life for someone to give him this reality check. But Flora doesn’t merely stop at telling him that his music is unmemorable; in keeping with the film’s spirit of emotional growth, she offers tips on how to make it better.

Crowley understands that staring at laptops isn’t the most cinematic of set-ups, and so, after a couple of virtual interactions, he feels confident enough to put Flora and Jeff in the same physical space. During a particularly emotional Zoom lesson, the camera pans over to the side, and we see him sitting across the table from her — this is reminiscent of how director Park Chan-wook made phone conversations more dramatic in Decision to Leave. But crucially, it’s always Jeff who manifests inside Flora’s apartment, or, on one memorable occasion, on her rooftop; there’s a reason why she isn’t magically transported to California.

Flora and Son is an almost pitch perfect feel-good movie — the sort that an even slightly cynical viewer would describe as contrived. And you wouldn’t even be able to challenge them, because they’d be right. The emotional beats land with scientific accuracy, there’s an effortless charm to the performances and writing, and such an easygoing rhythm to the storytelling that it makes the experience impossible to resist. It’s never easy to surrender yourself completely to a film, especially one that comes across as so desperate to be liked, but it helps when directors are able to make convincing arguments for why you should.

Flora and Son
Director – John Crowley
Cast – Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Orén Kinlan, Jack Reynor
Rating – 4.5/5