Flora and Son Is a Comforting, If Clichéd, Music Dramedy For the Modern Crowd

From the scrappy band geeks in Sing Street to the starving artists in Begin Again, the characters that litter John Carney’s filmography are soft-spoken underdogs who use music to say what they don’t otherwise know how to. While this is also the case of the eponymous protagonist in his newest feature film, the Irish director, screenwriter and lyricist takes it a step further with Flora and Son, asking: Can a person find their purpose through music, even if their ability to create it isn’t innate?

Part rom-com, part family drama and part musical, Flora and Son focuses on a young, working-class divorcée named Flora (Eve Hewson) struggling to raise her delinquent son, Max (Orén Kinlan) with little help from the boy’s father, Ian (Jack Raynor). Her world is upended when she takes up long-distance guitar lessons from an L.A.-based musician named Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and finds herself falling in love, with 5,000 miles of distance between them. If individual parts of this premise sound familiar, it’s because they are. Luckily, Hewson’s grounded performance and Carney’s witty script largely succeed in keeping this treacly dramedy afloat.

At a surface level, the characters in Carney’s film aren’t entirely likable. Max is a brat, and his mother laments giving birth to him more than once, both behind his back and to his face. The care they have for one another is unspoken, but swells more and more as the plot progresses and the two of them learn to bond over music (Max spends much of his time producing beats on his computer, presumably looking up to his father who was once in a band).

Meanwhile, Jeff comes off as pretentious as he patronizes Flora’s music taste, telling her that  “we’re gonna de-brainwash you” from liking mainstream pop-rock ballads—something that’s sure to get an eye roll out of anyone who’s ever had their listening habits assessed by a hipster. This particular conversation takes place during an early guitar lesson, when he asks her what her favorite song is and she takes a moment to ponder the question before landing on “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt. “Lyrics need to be more than just ‘you’re beautiful’ or some series of platitudes for lonely women, trying to make ‘em feel better about themselves,” Jeff says. “That’s not a love song. That’s a self-help group.” (“You don’t know the first thing about women if you think that,” Flora replies.)

If Flora’s song choice is basic (and it is), Jeff’s critique of it is even more so. As overplayed as this ballad was in the late 2000s, “You’re Beautiful” isn’t a sappy love song so much as it is a sad but sinister first-person account of a man stalking his ex. (“‘You’re Beautiful’ is not this soft romantic fucking song,” Blunt told Huffington Post in 2017. “It’s about a guy who’s high as a fucking kite on drugs in the subway stalking someone else’s girlfriend…and he should be locked up or put in prison for being some kind of perv.”)

Surely, Jeff’s pretentiousness is part of the point – as is the validity in Flora’s defense that there’s value in writing “a song that reaches millions of people’s hearts and makes them weep.” Still, the unspoken irony of Jeff’s assessment of this song calls into question whether his sentiments echo Carney’s. Intentionally or not, Flora and Son is a lot like the version of “You’re Beautiful” that Jeff describes: trite and commonplace, but also comforting in its familiarity, its appeal to emotions universal. Sometimes a Big Mac is just more comforting than broccoli, and the movie seems aware of the fact that that’s okay.

The music itself is a mixed bag. As he did with his breakout hit Once (2007), Carney pens some pleasant acoustic ballads, the standout being “Meet in the Middle,” a lovely duet between Hewson and Gordon-Levitt that endearingly captures personalities and flaws of their characters. In contrast, the electronic soundtrack from the opening club scene sounds thinly produced, and the generically empowering pop anthem that the film ends with also doesn’t hold up to the charming simplicity of that aforementioned song. To Carney’s credit, some of this seems purposeful; Max being a wannabe white boy rapper gives way to quite a few cringey lines (“Dressed from head to toe in Italian/Me in the bed, I’m like a stallion”), but it’s played for laughs, with Flora rolling her eyes as he spits these bars over a GarageBand beat. She embraces him because he’s only as cringey as your average 14 year-old—and frankly, so is she.

To this point, the movie is also very funny. Though the troubling relationship dynamics between Flora and Jeff, Flora and Max, Flora and Ian, and Ian and Max lend the film its heart, its greatest moments come from the lead’s banter with the men in her life – due in part to the writing of her witty comebacks (“I still like the other song too. Is that allowed?” she asks Jeff after he plays her a Hoagie Carmichael tune over Zoom) and in part to Hewson’s natural charisma. Most importantly, these scenes add levity to a script dealing with potentially dark material, tonal notes that are, for the most part, quite well-balanced. As such, Carney’s newest film may not hit the highs of Once and Sing Street, but as a feel-good musical for the digital age, it’s an enjoyable effort all the same. 

Director: John Carney
Writer: John Carney
Starring: Eve Hewson, Orén Kinlan, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jack Reynor
Release Date: September 29, 2023

Ursula Muñoz S. is a critic, journalist and MFA candidate at Boston University who has previously written for news and entertainment outlets in Canada and the United States. Her work has appeared at Xtra, Cineaste, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. For further reading, feel free to follow her on Substack and X, where she muses about Taylor Swift and Pedro Almodóvar (among other things).