John Carney’s Begin Again wants to be a love letter to making music for its own sake. It gets about halfway there.
The film stars Keira Knightley as Gretta James, a songwriter from England who comes to New York with her boyfriend and songwriting partner, Dave Kohl, played by Adam Levine. When she learns he has had an affair with a production assistant during a weekend in Los Angeles, she breaks up with him. Mark Ruffalo plays Dan Mulligan, a record executive who has just been fired and who finds Gretta singing at an open-mic night on the Lower East Side. He offers to sign her. She agrees.
That setup is the whole engine of Begin Again, and it runs smoother than it has any right to. The problem is what the film does with the miles it covers.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Trailers.
Dan Mulligan, Fired in Front of His Daughter
Dan is a mess the film never quite diagnoses. He lives in New York, estranged from his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener) and his teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld), and he is losing his grip on an industry that no longer works the way he does. Carney shows us the firing in front of Violet, then sends Dan on a drinking binge that ends at the bar where he hears Gretta sing.
Ruffalo plays the wreckage well. But the script keeps handing him charm where it should hand him consequence. Dan is fired and humiliated in the film’s first act, and by the second he is recruiting musicians with the energy of a man who has never lost anything. Begin Again wants his enthusiasm to read as redemption. Mostly it reads as a screenwriter who likes his lead too much to make him pay.
An Album Recorded All Over New York City
The best idea in Begin Again is the one Carney builds the middle around. After Saul (Yasiin Bey), Dan’s business partner and the label’s co-founder, turns Gretta away, Dan proposes they make the record themselves. They will cut it live, outdoors, across the city, over one summer.
That premise gives the film its texture. The album gets recorded in public locations around New York City, and the movie is at its most alive when it is just a group of people figuring out how to capture a sound in a place that was not built for it. Carney wrote the script in 2010, and Gregg Alexander composed most of the film’s music. The songs carry the film further than the plot does.
Gretta also pulls Violet into the project, encouraging Dan’s daughter to play guitar on the record. That thread is thin but it is one of the few places Begin Again lets a relationship develop without a speech.
Dave Kohl, the Boyfriend Who Sold Out
Begin Again needs a villain, and it settles on Dave. Levine plays him as a rising musician who has traded whatever he once had for the machinery of the business. When Gretta watches him accept an award on television, she attacks him for selling out.
Then she does something better than the script around her. With Steve (James Corden), the busker and her old friend, she records a song onto Dave’s voicemail laying out exactly what she thinks of him. It is the sharpest scene in the film, and it works because it is petty and specific rather than noble.
Dave, remorseful and back in New York to promote his new album, calls her and asks to see her. What follows is the film’s real test, and Carney does not take the easy exit.
What Begin Again Actually Gets Right
The cast is deeper than the film uses. Alongside Knightley, Ruffalo, Levine, Steinfeld, Keener and Corden, the movie has Yasiin Bey, Aya Cash, Maddie Corman, Karen Pittman and Andrew Sellon in small parts. Most of them get one scene and no arc.
The runtime is 104 minutes, which is right for this story. The film has a tagline — “You’re only as strong as your next move” — that promises a harder movie than the one delivered.
Carney had already made Once in 2007, and Begin Again is clearly the same filmmaker working the same seam: music as the thing that rescues people who cannot say what they mean. The difference is that Once trusted its silence. Begin Again fills every gap.
The Numbers Behind Begin Again
Begin Again premiered under its original title, Can a Song Save Your Life?, at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in theaters on June 27, 2014, alongside its soundtrack. Its budget was US$8 million, and it has grossed $63.4 million worldwide. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Lost Stars.”
Metacritic scores it 62 out of 100. The film drew mostly positive reviews from critics.
KEY FACTS
– Release date: June 27, 2014
– Runtime: 104 minutes
– Budget: US$8 million
– Worldwide gross: $63.4 million
– Metacritic: 62/100
– Academy Award nomination: Best Original Song, “Lost Stars”
Cast
– Mark Ruffalo as Dan Mulligan
– Keira Knightley as Gretta James
– Adam Levine as Dave Kohl
– Hailee Steinfeld as Violet Mulligan
– Catherine Keener as Miriam Hart
– James Corden as Steve
– Yasiin Bey as Saul
The music is the reason to watch Begin Again. The songs, written largely by Gregg Alexander, are good enough that you forgive the film for stopping to admire them. Knightley is convincing as a songwriter, which is harder than it sounds, and the recording-in-public gimmick gives the middle of the movie a momentum the script cannot generate on its own.
What holds it back is Dan. The film asks us to root for a man whose failures are treated as quirks. He is fired in front of his daughter, he drinks his way to a bar, he talks his way into a project, and Begin Again never makes him answer for any of it. Ruffalo is too good at making that charming. The movie mistakes his likability for growth.
The ending, at least, resists the obvious. Gretta is not handed to Dan as a prize, and the film understands that the album was the point, not the romance. That is a real choice, and it is the one that keeps Begin Again from dissolving into the pile of movies about sad men who are saved by a woman’s talent.
A 62 on Metacritic is about right. Worth an evening, worth the soundtrack, not worth pretending it is more than a pleasant film with one very good idea.
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