Flora and Son review – musical crowd-pleaser plays a simple but sweet tune

One of the biggest Covid losses for Sundance and for those who both premiere and acquire films there, has been the lack of in-person audience reaction over the last two years, something that has traditionally been a major barometer here more than at arguably any other festival. Crowds descend upon Park City to be pleased, to applaud, cheer, weep and perhaps feel a little smug that they were the first people to see The Little Film That Could.

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Films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Little Miss Sunshine and The Kids are All Right successfully carried this word of mouth all the way to both the box office and the Oscars and helped create a blueprint for the kind of Sundance movie everyone was looking to make, see and buy, for better or more frequently worse. Coda did somehow manage to sneak through in a pandemic year, the result of a nifty long-game campaign by Apple, but this year arguably the biggest question on the ground is which film can return to type and turn audience ebullience into real world success. Having managed this before with Once and Sing Street, the Irish writer-director John Carney is more equipped than most in knowing exactly which buttons to push and exactly how hard to push them. Announced as a buzz-free late addition to the lineup, his modestly made comedy drama Flora and Son seemed like a likely candidate but no one could have anticipated just how much audience enthusiasm it would inspire at its low-key yet high-passion Sunday afternoon premiere.

By the end of its tight 94-minute runtime, attendees were rabidly whooping, cheering and clapping to the beat of the final song, a dream response for the makers and an intriguing one for studios looking to purchase. While I might not have been stamping my feet with the rest of them, I was mostly charmed by what I had seen, a familiarly spoonfed festival formula but not one that left a sickly sweet taste in the mouth. Carney remains an unashamedly earnest sentimentalist (his films often seem like they would have been bigger hits decades prior) whose work is ill-suited for cynics and this is unlikely to lead to mass conversion for those resistant to his puppyish desire to be liked.

But even the hardest of viewers will find his latest choice of lead to be undeniable, a star-cementing performance from Eve Hewson, best known of late for Bad Sisters and for being Bono’s daughter. Despite her familial connection to music, Hewson is an untested newcomer to singing and performing, like her character. She plays working-class single mother Flora who found herself pregnant at a young age and mostly regretted it ever since, spending less time at home with her son Max (Orén Kinlan) and more time either looking after other people’s kids as a nanny or getting drunk and sleeping with Dublin locals. When she finds a half-busted guitar in a skip, she initially sees it as an easy, and late, birthday present for Max but his lack of interest ultimately leads her to see it as a way forward for her, seeking out an online guitar teacher in Los Angeles (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Music then acts as a transformative force, as it often does in Carney’s work, leading Flora to a long-distance flirtation, a renewed sense of self and a way to reconnect with her son and combine his love for making dance music on his laptop.

There are initial echoes of the far superior Wild Rose – a foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking reluctant single mother working in a domestic role looks at music as a way forward – but Flora and Son is a softer, simpler film, with moments of crudeness that ultimately give way to something sweeter. Hewson’s budding romance with Gordon-Levitt is endearingly developed, Carney at times cleverly taking away the barrier of a laptop and putting them both in the same place. There’s a specific, smartly written exchange about the pain of sharing art with someone who doesn’t respond well and a scene of the pair duetting on a song they co-wrote that’s one of the loveliest things I’ve seen all year, delivering exactly the kind of big emotional swell one craves from a film such as this. The mother-son dynamic is a little less effectively wrought, stretching both credulity (a teenager allowing his mother to shoot him making a rap video to impress a girl is … not believable) and emotional investment.

An immensely charming Hewson makes it all seem effortless, though, even as Carney’s manipulative string-pulling threatens to get a bit too forceful, an instinctive and quick-witted actor who drags the film’s sillier, flightier moments back to earth. I would argue that the big final song isn’t quite as impressive as it should be (especially when compared with that aforementioned duet) and there’s one particular storyline that desperately needed a more buoyant final lift but Flora and Son is a hard film to resist.

• Flora and Son premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution