Twelve years ago today,
like everywhere else in North America, all business stopped at the Toronto Film
Festival as the world watched the terrifying attacks on the World Trade Center.
Here in Toronto this morning, thinking of that day, it seemed appropriate to be
watching a film that’s an unabashed love letter to New York City. Can a Song Save Your Life?, the new
film from John Carney, the Irish director of the sleeper hit Once, is a
fairytale about the music business and as far from somber as a movie can get.
The festival has certainly hosted better films this edition, but Carney's lovely
location shooting all around the city was a sweet antidote to today’s
melancholy.
Keira Knightley plays an
aspiring songwriter and sometime singer who we later learn has broken up with
five-year boyfriend Adam Levine (the Maroon 5 front man and “Voice” coach)
after he’s achieved stardom and cheated on her. Singer pal James Corden
encourages her to perform a song at one of his bar gigs, where she catches the
ear of Mark Ruffalo, playing an alcoholic record company co-founder who’s just quit
over long-simmering “creative differences” and after a dry spell without a
successful new discovery. Ruffalo (platonically) pursues Knightley, who, after
putting up considerable resistance, decides to cast her fate with this wild
card. They hit on the idea of recording a demo album outdoors at various spots
around the city, incorporating the sounds of the neighborhoods.
You can surely predict
where all this is going, but Can a Song Save Your Life? is very genial, the songs are catchy, and screen
beauty Knightley reveals a fine singing voice. The Weinstein Company pounced on
this feel-good musical after its debut screening in Toronto.
Another musical
attraction today was All Is By My Side, which traces the early career of Jimi Hendrix from
his time playing backup with a funk band at New York’s Cheetah Club to his
extended stay in England, up to just before his jaw-dropping breakthrough at
the Monterey Pop Festival. The
biopic marks the second feature directing effort of
writer John Ridley, also represented in Toronto by his gripping screenplay for
the festival smash 12 Years a Slave. Ridley adopts a jagged style both visually and aurally,
evoking the whirlwind life of the groundbreaking, spacy and introspective
guitarist during a time when he was still finding his artistic identity and
sometimes confounding his listeners. It’s Hendrix before he became Hendrix, the
rock ’n’ roll wunderkind who briefly thrilled audiences before his death at 27.
All Is By My Side is still awaiting a
U.S. distribution deal, most likely because it’s an art film about the rock
legend, eschewing narrative drive for a more naturalistic approach to Hendrix’s
relationships and his evolution as an artist. Two women play central roles in
the story: Imogen Poots as Linda Keith, Keith Richards’ girlfriend, who is
presented in the film as the first true believer in Hendrix’s exceptional
talent and an important catalyst in his career; and Hayley Atwell as Kathy
Etchingham, a not-very-bright groupie who is utterly devoted to her man (and
sometimes oversteps her bounds). Hendrix is played by Andre Benjamin of
Outkast, who not only creates a reasonable surface facsimile of the music icon
but burrows into his earnest ’60s flower-child personality (and seems to be
doing the virtuosic guitar work required).
Even though it portrays
the pre-Monterey years, the film could have included Hendrix’s early U.K.-based
hits “Hey Joe” and “Purple Haze.” It doesn’t. But you will hear a pretty wild
version of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” nervily performed by
Hendrix before an audience including two Beatles. For the rest of the canon,
there’s always the documentary Jimi Plays Monterey.
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