As they sit in Union Square, watching the never-ending drama of New York City unfold before them on a summer night, Dan (Mark Ruffalo) tells Gretta (Keira Knightley) that what he loves most about music is its ability to take something banal and invest it with tremendous meaning. This statement both gets to the core of Dan’s character and the core of Begin Again the new film from writer-director John Carney (Once). In Begin Again, what would otherwise be a fairly forgettable story of fame and second chances is transformed by omnipresent music and musicality into an upbeat treat, a perfect alternative to the dour summer action movies.
Dan and Gretta are two lost souls. Dan once founded an independent record label and was renowned for his ability to develop artists, but his label has grown more corporate and he’s lost his golden touch in a haze of alcohol and personal problems. After one disastrous meeting, he’s thrown out of the company he built. Gretta’s problems are less self-created; after living with her boyfriend Dave (Adam Levine) for five years while working as a songwriting team, they moved to New York to pursue their dream of music. But despite working as a team in the lean years, Dave becomes a star while Gretta is increasingly pushed to the side by record execs and Dave himself. After Dave cheats on her while recording a new album, Gretta is ready to pack it in and move back to England. But before she does, she plays one more open mic in the Lower East Side, where Dan happens to hear her music, not just the notes she plays, but their potential; his mind fills in the orchestrations and he’s overcome with pure musical bliss.
Gretta is wary of Dan both because of his seedy appearance and because he’s part of the same machine that seduced Dave away from her, but his passion wins her over. They conceive an album recorded entirely outdoors, at different locations throughout NYC, from subway tunnels on to the lake in Central Park. They fill out their band with everyone from students, to the piano player from a children’s ballet class, to professionals on loan from Troublegum (Cee-Lo Green), a hip-hop mogul with a big smile and endless gratitude towards Dan for giving him his start.
The process of making the album ignites the latent artistic passion that they both had lost and improves other aspects of their lives too, allowing Dan to reconcile with his ex-wife and daughter and Gretta to reclaim her self-respect and get over her breakup. The film is unabashedly romantic, not that it makes a couple out of Dan and Gretta, but in that it shows them falling back in love with music, with life, with New York City in the summer, and it’s hard for the audience not to be swept along with them. Begin Again wears its sincerity on its sleeve, sometimes too much so, and the characters aren’t terribly well developed, but the movie’s rhythmic pacing and overwhelming enthusiasm make these problems easy to ignore. Cynics should stay away, but anyone in the mood for something warm-hearted and filled with music will find this film a pleasure.
