Love & Fame: BEYOND THE LIGHTS

More than anything, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights is a great romance. It’s not like we get a new one of those everyday. It’s about two people who make a meaningful connection, seeing the real souls behind images being constructed for them in the beginning stages of public personas, one a pop star, the other a politician. In the process of following their connection, the film weaves together showbiz drama and political ambitions to make a fine point about negotiations between public and private selves, and potential solace in finding a person who seems to love you for who you are, not just what you represent. It’s a sharply drawn, deeply felt story, as smart as it is sexy, as complicated as it is compassionate. It helps that it’s not a romantic fantasy, or rather, not only fantasy.

They meet at a moment of high drama. She’s Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an R&B diva on the rise. She hasn’t even released her first album yet, but she’s come a long way from getting second place in local talent competitions of her childhood, like the one that opens the film. Collaborations on hit songs – we see the video for one, a writhing, hyper-sexualized thing – with dim bulb rapper Kid Culprit (Richard Colson Baker) have just won her a Billboard Music Award. Everything’s looking up, but after the afterparty, when the handsome young cop (Nate Parker) bursts into her hotel room, she’s about to jump off the balcony. He saves her life, and her grateful stage mom manager (Minnie Driver in an intense performance) convinces him to tell everyone she merely slipped. The world knowing about the suicide attempt could really derail her rising star.

A more sensationalistic writer-director might take these early scenes as a launching pad for increasing stakes and twists. Instead, the film settles into a comfortable exploration of these characters. The actors provide nicely layered performances, able to play multifaceted people with ease. Noni is grateful for her hero cop’s help, and he’s drawn to her glimmer of personality hiding under half-dressed magazine-cover poses and hip-shaking choreography. They start a flirtation that becomes a tentative relationship, hounded at every turn by the gossip press and the dictates of their parents. Her mother wants to make sure her daughter's album drops flawlessly, and doesn’t want the new beau reminding the public about the incident. His father, the chief of police (Danny Glover), is helping his son prepare a run for city council, taking meetings with donors, consultants, party leaders. He has big dreams for his son, at one point telling him Noni isn’t “first lady material.”

This perspective makes the couple into rounded, complex people instead of cogs in a machine running on cheap dramatics. There isn’t a sense of inevitability because it’s grounded where the average Nicolas Sparks adaptation prefers sun-dappled fantasy. We understand where the characters are coming from, the goals they’ve worked so hard to achieve. It makes their connection all the more potent, to know what makes them tick apart from the spark between them. Too many movie romances rush this part, defining the central couple largely by how they interact with each other. This is a melodrama that earns its every tug on the heartstrings. The film is balanced, allowing us to see the surface allure that draws each in. He sees the glamour and fame of her lifestyle. She sees him as the square-jawed hero. But we also see how fragile a manufactured star she is, as well as the workaday cop duties and pragmatic political calculations he must consider.

With fine, realistic detail, we come to understand how the world works in their bubbles, what dictates the controls over their lives, and what difficulties may arise reconciling the two. These are characters whose ambitions are boxing them in, who let in some fresh air by finding a romantic spirit in an unexpected place, even at the risk of derailing their perfect plans for public life. There’s not a scene out of place as the film develops their lives and personalities separately and together. Parker’s dazed but encouraging presence is a nice match to the stifled insecurities Mbatha-Raw brings to the fore as we see glossy awards shows, photoshoots, and meetings with record labels contrasted with police calls and meet-and-greets. They’re both clad in uniforms. Hers are clinging dresses draped in chains, plunging necklines, and her straight purple hair. His are more literal, a police uniform, sharp suits. When they’re together, they’re more casual, relaxed, themselves. The wardrobes draw off-handed focus to their bodies, a sensuality that amplifies the comfort they increasingly feel towards each other.

The evolution of their relationship is so closely observed, wonderfully performed by the talented cast, and precisely developed by writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood. It’s not a film that declares itself loudly, but is so confident in its characters and perspective that it grabbed me in the opening frames and never let go. It’s the rare romance movie in which I actually was completely involved in the couple’s plight, desperate for them to find a way to be together. Their individual plotlines are finely detailed, with great scenes apart from one another, the better to make their scenes together sizzle with easy chemistry and swooning charm. It’s a great romance because it’s a good story with interesting characters. It would work as drama even without the romance, about the intimacy, not only between lovers, but collaborators, business partners, and parents and children as well. It has scenes that unfold with such simplicity and restraint, I found myself taken aback by how moved I was.

Prince-Bythewood is a major, often vastly underappreciated, voice in American cinema. With heartfelt romances like Love & Basketball and Disappearing Acts, and an appealing literary adaptation, The Secret Life of Bees, she’s proven herself a subtle and mature filmmaker. Her camera doesn’t call attention to itself. Her filmmaking craft is the stuff of sturdy, expert studio construction. But that invisible skill, no less effective than a more showboating style, allows her every frame to exude a well-considered eye for emotional terrains. With Beyond the Lights, she continues to be one of the last great Hollywood melodramatists. She’s unafraid to earnestly and tenderly tell stories of relationships without apology. This is her best film, a full, stick-to-the-ribs, heartwarming drama, rich with feeling.

Here we have a beautifully told story of human connection struggling to catch fire in a world that craves only shallow fakery and transactional relationships. It’s genuinely affecting, with larger themes, most potently about the way women are treated in the entertainment business, growing naturally out of who the characters are, why they make certain choices, and what they need from each other. This isn’t an uncomplicated love-conquers-all scenario with perfect soul mates healing each other. No, this is a mature and complicatedly nuanced story that earns its every moment of drama. Because it gives us something to care about beyond the relationship, it heightens the potency of the romance. It could’ve easily been maudlin in its relationship, scolding in its look at the entertainment business. But it’s not. The script has a sympathetic and subtle understanding of love, fame, depression, and self-actualization. It’s simply clear-eyed, genuine, and moving.

True Stories: NOWHERE BOY and CONVICTION

When making a film based on a true story the easiest and biggest problem is failing to find the compelling story within the facts. Especially when dealing with a figure like John Lennon, the temptation to go sprawling into unfocused hagiography must look pretty appealing. In Nowhere Boy, director Sam Taylor-Wood and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh wisely focus on the coming-of-age years in which Lennon was an older teenager, forging his identity and falling in love with rock and roll while experiencing some turbulent family conflict. The film is nothing spectacular. It’s awfully conventional and sometimes falls into biopic pitfalls, like including scenes that only resonate for viewers already aware of the history being told, but the nice period detail and fine acting really carry the picture.

Aaron Johnson, last seen as the lead in Kick-Ass, capably channels Lennon’s teen angst while showing hints of his developing musical talent. In the film, Lennon is torn between the maternal love of two women, his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) and the aunt who raised him (Kristin Scott Thomas). While Greenhalgh’s screenplay can get a bit too melodramatic at times, Wood’s unmemorable direction tends to balance it out so the family drama mostly works on the strength of the performers. The great Kristin Scott Thomas, most of all, delivers an excellent performance, inhabiting a strict, stiff-lipped, matter-of-fact woman who seems to take bad news all too well. Her barriers are strong, but it’s easy to see the strong emotions behind her sad eyes and pursed lips.

Running parallel to the family plot is Lennon’s increasing musical ambitions that give the movie its drive and pulse. I particularly enjoyed the scenes between Lennon and McCartney (Thomas Sangster), though they are imbued with the kind of vague weight that would easily puzzle those not already familiar with who these characters become. But who doesn’t know Lennon and McCartney? When the film ends, Lennon goes off to Germany to play some gigs with a new band. His aunt can’t remember the name.

This is a film that contains not one measure of The Beatles music, ending with Lennon on the precipice of ubiquity. It’s a film with young men stumbling towards the limelight, but when the credits roll it’s still nothing but a glint in their eyes. This is a solid film that remains tightly focused on a short period of time, a factor that’s key to its modest success and to its slight feeling of incompleteness.

Also based on true events is Conviction, which is a film that has no difficulty finding a narrative through-line. This is not a biopic. This is a legal drama about Kenny Waters, a wrongly convicted man (Sam Rockwell) who is imprisoned for years. No scene goes by without relating directly to the core plot. We get some flashbacks that feature childhood troublemaking with his sister, Betty Anne. The two kids, who lived with a neglectful mother and subsequently in a handful of foster homes, would break into houses to pretend they had a normal life. They would also stand up for each other, fighting ferociously and determinedly to right wrongs perceived to have been done to them. So of course, when Kenny gets life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit, Betty Anne springs into action. She gets her G.E.D. and then goes to law school, hoping to become a lawyer and argue on his behalf.

Rather than letting the story just speak for itself, veteran television director Tony Goldwyn, working from a script by Pamela Gray, spells out the inspiration we should all be feeling by indulging mawkish dialogue and pouring over nearly every scene an insistently sentimental piano score. Hilary Swank, as Betty Anne, is presented as a heroine of the Pyrrhic victory. With the case, she makes a little progress and gets pushed back a little further from her goal with regularity. In her personal life her single-minded pursuit of justice plays a part in her divorce and in her strained relationships. Swank puts on a distracting accent and appears to be perpetually on the brink of tears. I suppose it’s what the presentation asks for, but it’s far from her best performance.

These mildly disappointing elements don’t quite manage to fully distract from the inherent interest the story supplies. When the film works, it’s not always as an inspiring against-all-odds true story, though I am easily won over by a competent courtroom scene. Instead, the film works best as a showcase for character actors. Rockwell brings a humor and vitality to the role despite being limited by the material he has to work with. Smaller roles for the likes of Minnie Driver, Peter Gallagher, Juliette Lewis, and Melissa Leo are even better: total bite-sized delights. Driver has some genuinely fun one-liners, Gallagher is always a welcome presence, Lewis chews some scenery and Leo gets to deliver a nice bit of menace as a small-town cop.

Conviction is a film of good intentions, but it’s mostly one-note and one-dimensional. The tone and style is all TV-movie-of-the-week with a dull creakiness to its predictability. If it weren’t for the fine acting from the supporting cast, it would be easy to write it off entirely while urging those interested in the facts of the case to put Google to good use. As it stands, it’s a just-barely serviceable drama. It eagerly and unrelentingly hits its marks, but it doesn’t do much more than that.