Curated like a Spotify playlist for aspiring girlbosses, the new romantic comedy The High Note, starring Dakota Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross, takes place in a mythical Los Angeles music industry where anything is possible — provided you happen to be a cute white girl with big dreams, a perfectly tousled fringe, and an encyclopedic knowledge of vintage vinyl.
It's a kind of pop remix of The Devil Wears Prada, with Johnson (Fifty Shades of Gray) as Maggie Sherwoode, the ambitious personal assistant to Grace Davis (Black-ish and Girlfriends star Ross), a fortysomething R&B diva staring down an uncertain future of recycled greatest hits tours.
Though she's an amalgam of several artists, Grace can't help but evoke Ross's real-life mother Diana, a pop icon who flirted with her own movie stardom back in the 70s. (The costume design nods to Ross senior's diva classic Mahogany certainly help.)
With no new record in the works, Grace is considering a lucrative Vegas residency, a move that her longtime manager and pal, Jack Robertson (Ice Cube), knows is all too necessary for career survival — especially for Black women, historically among the first to be discarded by the pop scene as they approach middle age.
But hard-won career wisdom's got nothing on the dreams of a girl who just wants to keep the music real.
When Maggie isn't busy giving career advice to an understandably bewildered Jack — no one does arched-eyebrow irritability better than Cube — she's quietly remixing her boss's recent live album, hoping to realise her goal of becoming a producer.
Maggie is a screenwriter's idea of a musical aesthete: she's a little too eager to issue her deep-cut knowledge of R&B covers, Sam Cooke, and Carole King, all while dismissing the Eagles and praising Springsteen at his dreariest; she's a graduate of the school of High Fidelity, set loose in a magic-hour LA fetishised by aging hipsters and British transplants.
At one of those faux-quaint Laurel Canyon grocery stores for rich bohemians, Maggie meets cute — over Phantom Planet's OC hit, California — with David Cliff (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a singer-songwriter with a set of soulful pipes but little career direction.
Naturally, she takes it upon herself to tell him everything wrong with his sound — and how she can fix it.
Slickly directed by Nisha Ganatra (Late Night, TV's Transparent) from a script by first-time writer Flora Greeson — who drew upon her own experiences as a music industry assistant — The High Note is littered with these sorts of weirdly uninterrogated moments, even as it delivers its genre contrivances with what feels like a knowing wink.
Like so many self-idealised Los Angeles postcards, it's the kind of movie where assistants drive classic cars and live in roomy, affordable downtown lofts, where there's always a cool song playing on the radio and race, class, and inequality dissolve in the inclusive glow of Hollywood fantasy.
At the same time, it's quick to take easy shots at the usual suspects: Miami Vice-looking marketing executives, dumbo EDM producers (a sporting Diplo has a small, funny role), and anyone else that doesn't fit with the movie's creaky conception of authenticity.
To be fair, The High Note is mostly content to airbrush any pointed industry critique in favour of an earnest love of music; the kind that, when it works, approaches the breezy warmth of writer-director Cameron Crowe at his Almost Famous best.
Ganatra's attention to the central female friendships is perhaps the film's sweetest spot, as when Grace and Maggie cruise around in a convertible belting out TLC's No Scrubs — punctuated by Ross's infectious cackle — or an amusing, odd power dynamic subplot involving Grace's pool-house keeper (June Diane Raphael), who appears to be the radioactively-tanned ghost of Maggie's Christmas future.
It helps that Johnson, who's inherited a touch of her own Hollywood mother charisma to go with her easygoing sincerity, is appealing enough to mostly out-manoeuvre the manic pixie traces in her character, and that she and Harrison — whose musical talent here suggests Frank Ocean — have the chemistry to ease them through the film's cornier moments. (Just in case Johnson hasn't won you over, national treasure Bill Pullman plays her heartbroken, old school radio DJ dad.)
But lost in all of this is the film's most fascinating thread: Grace's career crossroads, and her very real fear of redundancy — and with it, the complexity that Ross is clearly ready to summon, if only the movie weren't in a rush to find its next feel-good beat
The brief glimpses of Grace's frustration and anger simmer to suggest a movie that never eventuates. Instead, it's buried in the quiet asides between Ross and Cube — moments that manage to evoke a lifetime of struggle, and what they've had to do to negotiate success.
"We could pretend that we live in your magical world, where — I don't know — age and race are not a thing," Grace snaps at Maggie, in one of the film's rare scenes when the facade peels back to reveal something raw.
It's a shame The High Note is too busy honey-coating its chase-your-dream production to let those messy emotions unravel up in the mix.
The High Note is in cinemas from September 24.
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2020-09-23 18:59:00Z
CAIiEJtGCYZ_nnJ3kN1Q8XNcDO8qFwgEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDoiokG
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