FILM IN REVIEW

1 8 2 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R Early on in Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat Loud, Frank Fisher (Nick O√erman), a single dad whose record store in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn is on its last legs, tries to inveigle his teenage daughter Sam into their weekly jam session. Sam (Kiersey Clemons ) is wrapped up in courses she’s taking to prepare for the UCLA pre-med program she’ll be entering at summer’s end. Her resistance to joining Frank may have something to do with her being an only child who’s about to leave home and is steeling herself for the break. But she’s not that resistant, and it doesn’t take long for her to give in to Frank – or for us to see that she doesn’t mind their music making at all. Sam begins the session noodling around on the keyboard, settling on a ri√ she’s written. It catches Frank’s ear, and he tells her to play it again, as he gradually adds some guitar. It turns out Sam has written lyrics as well, good ones, and with a little encouragement she begins singing them. Before long both Sam and Frank are intent on finishing what they’ve started, and the session goes on through laying down basic tracks, using the computer to flesh out the backing, and finally coming up with something Frank thinks is good enough to submit to Spotify. (He does and they take it.) 1 8 3 R This sequence feels like it goes on for twenty minutes, though it may be only fifteen, or even ten. At any of those lengths, it’s a substantial chunk of a ninety-seven-minute movie, and as far I was concerned I would have been happy for it go on for as long as Haley kept it in front of me. The great French director Jacques Rivette, whose movies were routinely three or four or more hours long, was the master of taking his time, of allowing audiences to enter a movie and wade around in it, acclimating themselves to experiencing the pace of day-to-day life as it is lived. There’s a scene in Rivette’s Haut/ bas/fragile in which the actress Laurence Côte comes home after a day at her library job, puts away the few groceries she’s bought, and stretches out on her bed to pet her cat and read a letter that’s just come in the mail from her mother. Nothing more happens, and yet it’s everything. The sequence conveys the satisfaction of being your own master after a day of being at someone else’s beck and call, the luxuriant ease of sinking back into the place you can call your own. Haley isn’t working at Rivette’s level. In some ways he’s the most ordinary of moviemakers. But at a time when the rule for American movies is spectacle and fragmentation and incoherence, his approach feels sane. The seemingly unremarkable experience of showing an audience characters talking or just going about their lives may, given the current state of American movies, be something close to defiance. When we like the characters as much as we like Frank and Sam, it’s a luxury. ThatlongsequenceofFrankandSamcomingupwiththeirsong is so casually done you could miss how carefully Haley has structured it. At first he sticks with the two as they add instrumentation or vocals. You get the sense of the song being built bit by bit, in something like the way it is in Jonathan Demme’s great video for New Order’s ‘‘The Perfect Kiss.’’ As in Demme’s video, the finished song is the point. And so after a while, while the completed song plays, Haley can resort to montage: Frank or Sam attending to some bit of music or just lazing around listening to a playback. What it all amounts to is a miniature version of the emotional arc of a movie about the tension between the harmony these two...