A struggling singer-songwriter in Cincinnati named Dandelion (Layne, If Beale Street Could Talk) pays the bills with a soul-crushing gig playing background music in a hotel lobby. (The film’s best joke? The repeated use of Nineties earworm “Hey Jealousy” to represent the banality of her job.) On a whim, Dandelion flees town for a battle of the bands at a South Dakota biker rally, where she meets another musician at a crossroads, the wet-eyed and emotionally wounded Casey (Doherty, of TV’s Gossip Girl and High Fidelity reboots). The bulk of the film takes place in the picturesque Badlands country, which writer-director Nicole Riegel (Holler) and cinematographer Lauren Guiteras harness in breath-catching long looks that dramatically play with the light, or absence of it. The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery. Original songs by Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National – though convincingly performed by Layne and Doherty – land without much impact (no earworms here), and the two leads rarely uncork the charisma they’ve shown in other, more purposeful projects.
This article appears in July 12 • 2024.
