Juliet, Naked: London Calling, Washed-Up Rock Star Emailing

If High Fidelity was a lovingly critical look at the maniacal behaviors of fandom—the all-consuming need to know as much as possible about popular artists, and to lord your superior tastes and knowledge over other worshippers of your ilk—Juliet, Naked is about the crippling consequences of artistry itself. Adapted, like High Fidelity, from a novel by Nick Hornby, it stars Ethan Hawke as Tucker Crowe, a has-been musician who a quarter-century ago released a beloved alt-rock album and then suddenly vanished from the public eye. Now he lives in his ex-wife’s garage in Upstate New York, barely knows four of the five children he fathered via four different women, and shuffles through grocery stores looking for cereal and gardening supplies. He’s like the ghost of Jeff Buckley crossed with the Dude from The Big Lebowski, if the Dude still collected royalty checks.

If that sounds like the recipe for a punishing study of squandered talent, never fear. Directed by TV veteran Jesse Peretz (Nurse Jackie, Girls) from a script by Evgenia Peretz (the director’s sister), Jim Taylor, and Tamara Jenkins, Juliet, Naked is a spry and largely delightful romantic comedy, a welcome summer breeze of warm humor and enveloping gentleness. It’s more of a curio than a landmark, which means it’s unlikely to be pored over for decades by the collectors and fanatics who populate Hornby’s works. But its disarming lightness should not be mistaken for insubstantiality. There’s craft in telling a story that’s decidedly pleasurable but doesn’t churn its sweetness into froth.

Tucker may be the fulcrum of Juliet, Naked, but he is not its central character. That would be Annie (Rose Byrne), the curator of a little-attended art gallery in an unremarkable town outside of London. Annie is a figure of relative normalcy who is initially most notable for the oddballs around her. Her sister, Ros (Lily Brazier), is a shameless flirt prone to seducing women who are either too young, too old, or too married. More problematic—and more central to the film’s plot—is Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), her live-in boyfriend of 15 years. Duncan is a literate professor of cultural studies, the kind of hip instructor who teaches a class comparing Shakespeare to The Wire and distributes a glossary of the latter’s Baltimorean dialect. (In a hilarious observation on the state of contemporary culture, he remarks that everything is much worse than it used to be, “with the notable exception of TV.”) Duncan is a pleasant enough guy, with one key quirk: He is absolutely obsessed with Tucker Crowe. I don’t mean “constantly brings up the album in conversation and owns a T-shirt with its artwork emblazoned on it” obsessed; I mean “runs a website entirely devoted to scrutinizing every shred of Tucker’s career and earnestly discussing conspiracy theories as to his whereabouts” obsessed.

You may know somebody in your life like Duncan. (Alternatively, you may be somebody like Duncan, but I’m not pointing any fingers here. Certainly not at myself.) And if you do, you will surely sympathize with Annie’s predicament, the vexing experience of playing second fiddle to a person your partner has never even met. So when Duncan receives a blank envelope with a CD labeled “Juliet, Naked” that contains never-released acoustic versions of songs from Tucker’s seminal album (which itself was called Juliet), you can hardly blame Annie when she goes on Duncan’s website and writes a scathing review in the comments, calling the songs half-formed and insipid. But you will certainly be surprised—and Annie is flat-out gobsmacked—when she receives an email complimenting her review from… Tucker Crowe.

Honestly, you can pretty much guess what happens from there; one of the pleasures of the rom-com is its soothing predictability. After Annie confirms Tucker’s identity (in a nice touch, he still uses an AOL email account), the musician and the girlfriend of his biggest fan strike up an epistolary relationship, each unburdening themselves and discussing their increasingly oppressive feelings of discontent. Before long, Tucker is flying to London, the sparks prove to fly in person just as easily as they did on the electronic page, and Annie becomes the second person in her household to fall in love with an indie-rock god.

But if Juliet, Naked hews somewhat closely to the conventions of its genre, it still manages to feel fresh and even vital. Part of its success lies in its modesty, its refusal to pretend that it’s somehow bigger than it really is. Where most rom-coms strew obstacles in their protagonists’ paths in an artificial effort to keep them apart and generate suspense, this movie is gratifyingly intimate and natural. (In this, it is perhaps the antithesis of Crazy Rich Asians, an overstuffed picture that is nevertheless enjoyable on its own terms.) There are no big catastrophes or contrived misunderstandings; when Tucker stands Annie up on their first date, she immediately forgives him once she realizes his “pretty good” excuse (that he’s been hospitalized after suffering a mild heart attack). Nor does it attempt to force a love triangle, given that Annie and Duncan break up before Tucker even arrives. A potential subplot involving Tucker tracking down his eldest daughter, whom he’s never met, is handled with remarkable honesty and intelligence. And while the comedy occasionally tips into marvelous farce—a scene in the hospital when Tucker’s various exes and kids continually parade into the room is a masterful example of Peretz’s quiet talent for cutting and blocking—for the most part it’s defiantly human-scaled, relying on the screenplay’s smart dialogue and the talents of its leads.

Who are both quite good. Hawke, having spent the early part of this decade cultivating an aura of cool-dad mystique in films like Before Midnight, Boyhood, and 10,000 Saints, is perfectly cast as a washed-up rock star, leaning into his casual charisma such that Tucker is always the center of gravity even as he’s totally relaxed. The trickier job falls to Byrne, whose Annie is more of a reactive character; she manages nicely, suggesting a woman of actual substance rather than a blank slate who’s helplessly drawn into Tucker’s magnetic vortex.

Of course, she’s arguably less attracted to Tucker than Duncan is. And the other facet of Juliet, Naked that sets it apart is the way it explores the ever-shifting Venn diagram of the people who create art and the people who consume it. Tucker’s music is, well, pretty good; Hawke may not have the pipes of Jack Black, but he has a plaintive, cracking voice that capably fronts the soundtrack’s various ballads. (Speaking of which: Despite being a card-carrying Counting Crows fan, I’m hardly an authority on ’90s rock, but to this untrained ear, Tucker’s album—which was actually written by luminaries like Conor Oberst, Robyn Hitchcock, and Ryan Adams, along with composer Nathan Larson, and which features emo-ish song titles like “Sunday Never Comes”, “We’re in Trouble,” and “20th Call of the Day”—certainly seems credible as an artifact of the era.) But it’s still just a record, and even though it made Tucker rich, he seems baffled, even disgusted, that Duncan reveres it so completely.

And here, Juliet, Naked flips Tucker’s affable apathy on its head. In dramatic terms, Duncan is the movie’s worst character, a tiresome cliché of the pathetic music nerd; he’s so single-mindedly devoted to Tucker that he makes John Cusack’s vinyl-toting snob from High Fidelity seem well-adjusted. (Even accounting for the power of inertia, you still have to wonder why Annie stuck around him for a decade and a half.) But even if the screenplay gives Duncan short shrift, it doesn’t entirely deprive him of dignity. In a surprisingly poignant confrontation with Tucker, Duncan mounts an impassioned defense not just of Juliet itself, but of his own admiration for it and attachment to it. “I don’t care what it means to you,” he snarls at his idol. “It means something to me.” Tucker may be uncomfortable with that truth, but he really did make something that possessed the power to change people’s lives.

Will Juliet, Naked change yours? Probably not. But movies don’t need to be radical to be valuable, and I’m grateful to Peretz for making one that’s effortlessly enjoyable and also deceptively insightful. If that isn’t your thing, no worries; I promise not to savagely attack you on internet message boards. After all, even if you dismiss this movie as trivial—even if you find it flimsy and unmemorable—that doesn’t change the fact that it means something to me.