In Memoriam: Glen Hansard

John Carney’s 2007 little musical indie that could “Once” opens with an unbroken shot of a nameless street busker (see bottom of the post) played by Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard standing on the street at night strumming guitar and singing. Utilizing a handheld camera, Carney starts the scene in long shot, conveying how the street is deserted and that Hansard’s character is not so much busking in this moment as singing just for himself. In the song, one that is both Hansard’s composition and his character’s composition within the movie, evoking its blurred lines, “Say It to Me Now,” he at first seems to plead with an unnamed lover to tell him what she needs to tell him, if there is, in fact, something to tell. As the song moves to its conclusion, however, the subject whom he is addressing seems to shift, from an unnamed lover to the Lord Almighty, pleading with Him that if he has something to say to our unnamed busker, to say it now. He is no longer performing, even, he is shouting into the void, even as Carney gradually moves his camera into close-up, intimacy, intensity, and emptiness in equal measure. Then, Carney takes a couple steps back with the camera to reveal that the nameless busker has acquired one listener, a nameless girl played by real-life Czechian singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová. His moment effectively becomes her moment too, the camera letting her into it just as he will let her into his life as they go on to make literal music together, filling up that aching void we have just felt. I remember seeing this sequence for the first time almost 20 years ago at the Landmark Century in the mall that time forgot like it was yesterday, how music and just a few shifts of the camera could say everything.

“Once” was a runaway success, first at Sundance and then out in the world, commercially and critically and Hansard and Irglová proceeded to win the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly.” That there was a mite of controversy as to whether having been composed a couple years earlier it had technically been written for the movie, as Academy criteria dictates, only underlined how dumb the rules of that category are in the first place and how even the sullen sticklers of such dumb rules were swept away by the movie’s ineffable spirit. Though Hansard had cultivated a successful career in the music industry up to that point as frontman of the Irish rock band The Frames, the fame and success with “Once” was on a different level, and even given their 18-year age difference that we might say, charitably, was, ah, a bit discomforting, it was also maybe inevitable that Hansard and Irglová would wind up together, a relationship based on an intense experience, to quote Sandra Bullock in “Speed.” Of course, Bullock’s character said such relationships did not last, and neither did Hansard and Irglová’s, recorded for hard-to-watch posterity in the 2011 documentary “The Swell Season,” though even as they both went on to marry other people, and have kids, their musical partnership endured; they released an album together just last year. No one else knew what Hansard had been through except Irglová, and vice versa.

Prior to 2007, Hansard had only acted once, in 1991’s Irish rock band comedy-drama “The Commitments,” and even then, he “was basically just doing what I was told,” he would explain to the Montreal Gazette. Unwittingly, the singer/songwriter was describing what a lot of movie acting is, a performance shaped by the director and the camera as much as the performer. Yet, even if Carney did that to some degree in “Once,” he also honored his formal training-less leading man’s request to frequently keep the camera far away, even hidden, to encourage naturalism, demonstrating that there are many ways to string one’s guitar. Originally, County Cork native Cillian Murphy was going to play the role, getting cold feet and bowing out due in part to the octave-changing nature of the songs that he felt he could not handle. Those octave changes of Hansard’s, as the “Say It to Me Now” opening suggests, from tender to full-throated, melded with his performance, not hesitant in moments when he was not singing, but more reserved, even a bit sheepish, only to unleash behind the microphone. He might not have possessed the technique to evince a truly complicated individual, but in his way, did something more than that, manifesting the way in which recording artists tend to express themselves through their music and embodying an earnest belief in that music that, I suspect, only a non-actor could.

I thought of “Once” last year while watching the disappointing Bruce Springsteen movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere” about his recording the “Nebraska” album. Those sessions also famously included he and The E Street Band recording what would become the title track to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a performance so exhilarating that producer Jon Landau deemed it “the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio.” You see the moment in “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” and it’s effective in a classic Hollywood sort of way, if not quite the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio. In “Once,” on the other hand, when Hansard and Irglová’s characters scrounge up enough money to lay down a studio demo, Carney imbues a D.A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall feel, a la his documentary recounting the recording of the Original Cast album for the Broadway musical “Company.” That included an unforgettable sequence of Eileen Stritch doing take after take, deep into the night, trying to nail the solo for “Ladies Who Lunch,” going to show how what might sound spontaneous on record is often anything but. Sometimes it is, though, as it was with “Born in the U.S.A.” and as it is when Hansard and Irglová and their makeshift band lay down one take of “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” It’s thrilling, the way Carney frames and editor Paul Mullen cuts it, so that you implicitly feel how the electricity coursing between the nameless guy and girl and the electricity coursing through the performance itself is one and the same. (During the beach montage scene not long after, Carney, in fact, runs the song back again, as if this moment is so overwhelming we need to hear it a second time to process it.) It might not, itself, be the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio, but it probably comes closer than anything we have to capturing what it must have been like for Jon Landau to hear Bruce throw down “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time. 

Glen Hansard died on Wednesday July 29th in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash west of Dublin. He was 56.

The Worst Movie I Have Ever Watched in a Theater

A couple weeks ago the staff at Defector was asked to name the worst movie they had ever watched in a theater and provide a brief explanation why. The post has since received over a thousand comments, as you might expect, and it naturally made me reflect on the question, though I wondered if it was a good idea to contribute with a post of my own. I wasn’t sure if I felt like going negative at a moment when everything already feels so negative in the first place. It sometimes feels easier to reflexively lambaste a movie you dislike than elucidate a movie you love. But the thing is, even seeing a bad movie in the movie theater can be illuminative. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was dreadful and made worse from my perspective because it was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic, but it also provided an essential moment of clarity: what “Star Wars” meant to me when I was a kid did not matter anymore, had stopped mattering to me a long, long time ago, and I could just put the whole thing up on a figurative shelf. When I saw “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the theater in the spring of 1990 at the age of 12, I had the profound realization that, hey, you know what, not all movies are good. 

I stayed ‘til the end of “The Rise of Skywalker,” and even more unbelievably I stayed ‘til the end of “Reindeer Games” (and saw it at all even though the person working the box office literally laughed when I said what show I wanted to see) in the winter of 2000, but I did not stay ‘til the end of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” in 2007. The first one, honestly, is overrated, inflated by the immense quality of Johnny Depp’s performance, the second one sagged, but the third was at once so gluttonous and so moribund that I simply reached a point where I literally thought to myself, “I cannot take another second of this,” stood up, and walked right out of the theater. It is the only movie I can recall paying for and leaving early. I did not walk out of “The Scorpion King” in 2002 but only because I was seeing it with my friend Nicolle and her family and because we were seeing it at the late, beloved second-run West Des Moines movie house Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, meaning I could just order another cheap light beer to power through. 

See, I worked at a movie theater in the late 90s and worked for much of it as a projectionist and/or manager, meaning I was tasked with screening virtually every movie we got after hours to ensure the film reels had been properly put together. That meant seeing a lot of dreck and so, occasionally, if there was another manager willing to endure the whole thing, there were movies I walked out of, I just didn’t pay for them. That makes leaving early a little different, a little easier to give up, like I did on “The Postman,” or on “Varsity Blues.” Once, a fellow manager and I started “My Favorite Martian,” just the two of us, and found it so affectless that we fast-forwarded the reels on the projection platter to the end so we could just go home. 

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife reports that she has never walked out of a movie, though she has seen some bad ones in the theater, nevertheless, so many bad ones that she could not narrow it down to single title when I put this question to her. “Legal Eagles,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” much to the chagrin of Jack Donaghy, “Light of Day,” which breaks her heart because she was a Michael J. Fox stan long before the term stan even entered the cultural lexicon, and “Gung Ho,” were all movies she provided as being among the worst of the worst she has seen in a theater. They were not, as she explained, schlock, a critical designation meaning they were not low budget cheesy fun but the tedious horse latitudes of Hollywood. Those four titles she supplied all sound like part of the bad DVD shelf from The Onion. 

“Pushing Tin” was on The Onion’s figurative bad DVD shelf and was also mentioned by someone in the Defector comments as the worst movie they had ever seen in a theater. And that’s what a lot of the movies I watched in the theater during those days were like – “Pushing Tin.” They were watched but not necessarily remembered; transitory in the bad way. And it does invite a question: is the worst movie watched in movie theater one that spurs nothing more than total lack of interest, or is it one that provokes intense dislike? My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife also mentioned “Under the Skin” as one of the worst movies she has seen in a movie theater, not because it washed over her unremembered because she was disgusted by it just as I was disgusted by “The Trip to Italy” as tantamount to a three-hour Widespread Panic concert with celebrity impressions in place of guitar noodling. She and I can agree to disagree on those movies (I loved “Under the Skin”; she loved “The Trip to Italy”), but I think we would both agree those movies are doing something, they are just doing something that each of us personally rejects. I mean, I have not yet mentioned “Armageddon”, which I generally cite as the worst movie I have ever seen, and I did see it in a movie theater. But even I will admit that Michael Bay is an auteur in his way, and even if his aesthetic made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs, he did not cause my eyelids to droop, and then to ultimately close.

In 2004, on the other hand, I fell asleep watching “Van Helsing” in a theater. Why did I see that movie? Probably because of Kate Beckinsale, if I’m being honest, or maybe because back then I saw almost everything on opening weekend and there was nothing else opening that week in central Iowa. And the thing is, that’s really all I remember of the experience: falling asleep. I could not recite a line, a scene, a moment, nothing; I do not remember a single thing that happened aside from suddenly waking up from a nap I did not realize I drifted into and thinking, “Hey, when did Frankenstein’s monster get here?” I might have walked out right then except I was mired in that post-afternoon nap state of grogginess, could not really bring myself to move, surrendered, fell back in my chair, and apropos of the worst movie I have ever watched in a theater, dozed off again. 

In the Grey

“In the Grey” is the figurative place where Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works as a debt collector for shady investment firms lending massive sums of money to unscrupulous borrowers. Borrowers like criminal tycoon Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), from whom Rachel is hired to extract the one billion he never paid back, the narrative engine of writer/director Guy Ritchie’s action-thriller. You cannot, alas, just sit down and ask a criminal tycoon’s lawyer, Mr. Horowitz (Fisher Stevens, having the most fun of anyone in the cast, I swear), for the money, though she does just that as something of a feint before pressuring Salazar by dispatching her team of furtive operatives led by Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill) to sabotage his various businesses and bring him to the table. If this set-up raises some comical notions of criminal code, like the pseudo-ethical line between going after someone’s business investments and someone’s personal investments, Ritchie mostly just treats all this financial gobbledygook as pretext for ravishing scenery and an ultimate showdown with Salazar’s private army on his private island. Rachel might technically be in charge, but Ritchie’s heart is with Bronco and Sid.

That’s a little ironic because between and this and Ritchie’s previous action opus, “Fountain of Youth,” it would seem he wants to help make González a star. His idea of doing so here, however, seems to be nothing more than putting her in fabulous costumes. Indeed, those costumes, courtesy of Loulou Bontemps, are the real stars, including a flowing white get-up in a brief desert scene that looks plucked from luxury Tatooine fashion magazine, and a half-black, half-white dress that suggests a wearable black and white cookie commissioned for the Met Gala. As far as her vaguely defined character goes, Rachel’s team codenames her mom, seeming to paint all these buff, proficient, weapon-toting operatives as her sons, except that in Gyllenhaal and Cavill’s understated, frequently deadpan chemistry there is no mistaking the unmentioned but obvious homoerotic undertones between Bronco and Sid. Are they sons or lovers, Ritchie does not seem to know, nor care, never committing, mere allusions ultimately signifying nothing even if glimpses of the fun Gyllenhaal and Cavill are having still emerge now and again. 

Often Ritchie the screenwriter is just teeing it up for Ritchie the co-producer and location manager Nicolás Kico Aráez to shine, marshaling I-don’t-know-how-many locales and places, and teeing it up, too, for editor Martin Walsh to stitch so many scenes and accompanying exposition together. It’s nothing if not a professional production and that professionalism echoes Bronco and Sid’s habitually unfazed approach, so unfazed as to be damn near aloof. They are so good at what they do, that even as the plot picks up speed and the stakes theoretically increase, everything fits together with minimal fuss, so much so that the one hitch consciously feels like screenplay engineering, underlined in how Ritchie never even really lets the nominal emotion of it resonate. It’s ultimately evocative of “In the Grey” itself, a slam-bang thriller that passes like an inconsequential breeze.

Friday's Old Fashioned: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has one of the greatest movie character introductions: a solitary figure virtually hidden beneath an enormous fur coast astride a horse in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902. When the figure finally reaches its destination of a rugged mining town, it dismounts and removes the coat. You expect, say, Tom Hardy as a neanderthal-like mountain man and instead, Warren Beatty emerges. He is John McCabe, wearing a suit, albeit a bit rumpled given the circumstances, and dons a derby hat, tipping it to a passerby, cutting the image of a displaced dapper gentleman. The town is named Presbyterian Church, but its central gathering place is the saloon, not the chapel, where McCabe promptly heads, throws a cloth over the table, as if seeking to class up the joint a little, and fires up a card game to start making some money. The saloon owner, Patrick Sheehand (René Auberjonois), approaches, asking if they go into business together by working out a cut of the proceeds, but McCabe begs off. The scene is infused with Altman’s patented style of overlapping dialogue, myriad conversations happening at once, and has the effect of establishing the town itself existing independently of McCabe while simultaneously imbuing the sense that McCabe exists always at center of his own universe.

His universe is thrown for a loop when he purchases three women and opens a brothel, one that only starts turning a profit, however, when the recently arrived Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) convinces him to make her a partner and let her run the place since it’s clear his business acumen lags behind his braggadocio. Indeed, Beatty gives an exemplary performance of a man putting on airs who almost, but not quite, knows he is putting on airs and which pairs perfectly with Christie’s raw candor; there’s this thing she does with her face, occasionally twisting it into a kind of confounded grimace, not able to fathom this blustery half-imbecile before her. When they sit down for breakfast to hash out the details of their partnership, Mrs. Miller orders almost as much as Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” though it’s not a come-on as it was in that 2017 movie but a throwing down, leaving McCabe to look on like a lost little boy. He might become attracted to her, and she to him, but when they eventually wind up in bed together, Altman’s camera drifts away from them and to Mrs. Miller’s dresser where he has put the cash to pay for her time, as funny and sardonic a shot as you’ll see. 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is all business. Even the rumor that he McCabe a gunfighter of some renown known as Pudgy McCabe, which is eventually called into question, comes to feel mostly like a matter of branding. McCabe might claim to have poetry in him, but we don’t hear any of it. The world that Altman cultivates in the dim interiors and frequently harsh exteriors, a town with mud for streets and lumber stacked high is still in the process of building itself, is one that does not make room for poetry. Merely surviving day to day is the highest priority. That becomes an open question for McCabe when the powerful mining company with a hold on the town dispatches a couple representatives to try and buy out McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s successful operation. And though “The Art of the Deal” might not have been published until seven decades later, McCabe proves its ideas are timeless, spurning the initial entreaties as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger payout, only to peeve the negotiators and wind up with three men sent to kill him in lieu of any further bargaining. Art of the deal, indeed.

In another movie, this might be the moment when McCabe finds something within himself that he did not know he had to become a hero. That very notion is mocked by having McCabe meet with a politically ambitious lawyer (William Devane) who suggests taking the mining company to court, sticking it to large corporations and making McCabe a hero of small business owners everywhere, an idea that McCabe quite likes, even repeating it to Mrs. Miller. She looks at him like his days are numbered. He can’t stop what’s coming, though there will be no quick draw or ten paces, foreshadowed in one of the hired guns, a sadistic kid (Manfred Schulz), killing a goofy innocent (Keith Carradine) just to kill him. There is no gallantry here, just gutless desperation, and the ensuing shootout between McCabe and the three men is as funny as it is tragic with our nominal hero mislaying his shotgun and having it confiscated by a minister, of all people, stopping off for a beer and a bump midway through, scurrying around in the falling snow, and shooting people in the back. As it plays out, the Presbyterian church catches on fire, causing the town folk to rally together to save it, a sly juxtaposition to the gunfight that only emphasizes its meaningless. As the town is saved, McCabe winds up dead in the snow and Mrs. Miller winds up in a drug-induced stupor, just one more failed business venture, the American Dream brutally reconstituted as an opium haze. 

Happiness

Just as there is no secret to happiness in life, neither is there any one secret to conjuring happiness itself on the movie screen. Sometimes you only see happiness for a split second, like Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” listening to CCR in his car and tapping in time on the roof, and sometimes it takes the whole movie to effuse it, as happens in Aaron Katz’s masterpiece “Cold Weather” when you realize in the last shot along with the character on the screen that happiness has been, as it is sometimes said, the whole journey up to this concluding destination. Sometimes happiness is summoned in a flash by an actor, as Ashley Judd summoned it in “The Locusts” when her character thanks Jeremy Davies’s character for a dance, and sometimes it is suffused on screen by the director, as it was by Michael Mann in “Miami Vice” when Colin Farrell and Gong Li are speedboating off to Cuba for mojitos and the wind is whipping in their hair, and Patti LaBelle and Moby are on the soundtrack, and Mann frames it so the sky and ocean seem to stretch out forever to bring to life that old idiom: the world is their oyster (or, their Cuban highball). And sometimes happiness on screen blurs with happiness off screen as it did in “To Have and Have Not” when Lauren Bacall’s Slim shows Humphrey Bogart’s Steve how to whistle and when he smiles, the fourth wall ineffably dissolves, and you can no longer tell the difference between Bogey and Steve. 

When I read that Brenda Fricker died on July 16th, aged 81, in her hometown of Dublin, I immediately went looking on YouTube for one scene in “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” It’s the scene when Charlie MacKenzie (Mike Myers) is going to see his parents, Stuart MacKenzie (Mike Myers, again) and May (Fricker), to watch a soccer match. It’s a Saturday night, and we know this because director Thomas Schlamme calls up The Bay City Rollers’ 1974 song with the sixth day of the week for its title. The number one hit is diegetic because we see Stuart moving in rhythm to it as he tends his Scottish Wall of Fame and because we see May grooving to it as she enters stage right and gets a beer from the mini-fridge and because then we see Stuart and May lock arms in a do-si-do. 

There is a feeling to a Saturday night that can’t really be put into words, or that I can’t really put into words, I should say, no matter how many times I have tried, though The Bay City Rollers, bless their hearts, captured it and in their do-si-doing to it, Fricker and Myers capture it too, a brief flash of absolute satisfaction with life. 

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

Longtime and extremely loyal frustrated followers of Cinema Romantico know that we begin each new year with a middling thriller-only movie preview. The problem, however, is that not all upcoming release information is yet available in January. Last year, the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” was not announced until June. And so, with unbearably scorching temperatures, wildfire smoke blotting the sky, dangerous lettuce on the loose, and virtually everything else in the United States being so bleak and stupid, we thought it might be a fine time to re-peruse the release list and see what additional middling thrillers we have to anticipate. 

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

The Brink of War, August 14. A historical thriller for the dad in your life of Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavík Summit might be notable to most for the casting of Jeff Daniels as the former and Jared Harris as the latter but is most notable to the blog that believes Hope Davis should be in everything for casting Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. That casting decision is why we are willing to overlook writer and director Michael Russell Gunn having exclusively worked in television, cinema’s little brother, up until now and that truly frightening Netflix-like sheen to the cinematography. 

Onslaught, September 4. A middling thriller about an Army sniper (Adria Arjona) living in a trailer park defending her family against a titular onslaught of genetically engineered super soldiers should star Hope Davis too, of course, or at least Marisa Tomei, who should also be in everything, but the casting of Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson gives this one a cheerfully retro feel, like it was made in the 80s but accidentally got left on a shelf somewhere. 

The Mongoose, October 30. Hey! Look at this! It’s a Liam Neeson middling thriller co-starring Marisa Tomei! Hollywood is finally starting to get it! The plot description on IMDb reads more like the first sentence of the screenplay and, honestly, I get it because, really, what else do you need to know than this: “A highly decorated combat vet, Ryan ‘Fang’ Flanagan, is fleeing a murder scene at 130 miles an hour in a Mustang Shelby cobra GT 65.” LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Fix, September 11. Another Liam Neeson joint, because why not? This sounds a lot like “Triple Frontier,” J.C. Chandor’s not-entirely successful ex-military operatives pull a heist movie from 2019 but trading the South American jungle for Afghanistan. The crucial difference is that Neeson is playing a character named Larry and for reasons I can’t quite articulate but utterly feel, nevertheless, Neeson as a Larry tickles my funny bone. He’s definitely less of a Larry and more of a ‘Fang.’

The Runner, September 2. “Phone Booth” for exercise junkies.

Motor City, July 24. The screenplay for this 1970s-set revenge thriller was apparently on Hollywood’s so-called Black List, screenplays liked around town not yet produced, but to me this seems more like one more piece for the Shailene Woodley Was Blacklisted evidence pile. 

By Any Means, September 4. Imagine if Mark Wahlberg said, “Get me my own version of ‘Mississippi Burning.’” A movie like that could be the thinking guy’s movie for guys who like movies, or it could be a disaster of epic proportions. 

Masterplan, October 16. If Stanley Tucci asked me to help him steal the Mona Lisa, I would probably say yes.

The Whisper Man, August 28. A middling thriller of a widowed crime novelist, his retired police detective dad, and the son of a serial killer with a cast of Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, Michael Keaton, and Michelle Monaghan is, well, exactly what it sounds like: prestige last weekend of August fare.  

Penélope Cruz: not in Bunker.

Bunker TBD. Speaking of prestige middling thrillers, Penélope Cruz starring as a wife who takes umbrage with her husband (played by her real-life spouse Javier Bardem) building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire sounds like free agent LeBron James signing with the Charlotte Hornets. I wonder if the bunker will be more lavish than a Pe Emirates luxury first-class private suite? 

Above the Below / Above and Below. Upon reading about “Above the Below” (December 4), co-starring and co-directed by Idris Elba, in which three astronauts find themselves stranded at the bottom of the ocean after their space capsule crashes upon re-entry, I went looking for the trailer and found one instead for another 2026 middling thriller called “Above and Below” (July 29) in which two people are trapped beneath the ocean in a shark cage. Did I hallucinate? Are these two movies, in fact, the same and A.I. just caused one to accidentally morph into the other? I was going to make a joke that “Above and Below” might morph between now and then into “As Above, So Below” but that movie was already made in 2014. 

Carolina Caroline

The funny thing about confidence game movies is that because they tend to rely on familiar narrative devices and patterns, they effectively become confidence games themselves, persuading the audience to believe what they are seeing no matter how clichéd and obvious. James Foley’s “Confidence” (2003) was not especially good at such persuasion, save for one sequence ripped directly from David Mamet’s superior “House of Games” (1987). As I watched it, I thought, “this is like ‘House of Games,’” and yet, Rachel Weisz still got me to sign on the figurative dotted line. Adam Carter Rehmier’s “Carolina Caroline” is the latest confidence game movie as confidence game itself, though in this case, screenwriter William Thomas Harper IV has melded a confidence game movie with a lovers on the lam movie. If that renders the task doubly difficult, it makes the result all the more remarkable; just like Caroline herself, you might well spot the emotional swindle and then give yourself over to it anyway.

If Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker was a bored waitress in small town Texas than Samara Weaving’s Caroline Daniels is a bored gas station attendant in small town Texas. Her life is altered, however, when Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner) walks in and hoodwinks her owner with a shortchange con. Caroline calls him on it, but only because his charismatic chutzpah sweeps her off her feet, and because she sees an opportunity not so much to leave her small town as go find the mother who abandoned her in South Carolina. Before long, she has left her genial dad (Jon Gries) behind for a life on the road in which she learns the confidence game ropes before graduating to bank robberies, wielding a weapon and getting the cash while Oliver drives the getaway car. Rehmeier typically conveys these scenes in montages scored to pop songs and just as Oliver dismisses free will as an illusion, that we are guided by neurons firing in our brains, I confess, when Rehmeier cued up Margo Cilker, or Sarah Shook, or Chris Stapleton, or Emmylou freaking Harris covering Bruce freaking Springsteen, I had to confess that neurons were being fired in my brain over which I had no control.

“Carolina Caroline” does not merely get by on its soundtrack, however, but also Weaver and Gallner’s chemistry, which defies description, a real you have to experience it to understand it sort of situation. It not only carries the movie through the fallow first half, but makes the back half when events take a turn for the worse hurt for real. Yet, at the same time, there is an undercurrent of nihilism that “Carolina Caroline” can’t quite square; if anything, Caroline’s eventual meeting with her mother works as an overly neat excuse for it. Oliver seems to have a nihilistic streak too, though “Carolina Caroline” never peels back the character’s mask enough to let us know. If Caroline can’t help but see him through the haze of romantic projection, that’s how “Carolina Caroline” ultimately chooses to see him too, meaning that with the capping confidence game the character and the movie unite in pulling the wool over their own eyes.